26. FBI as reader (Total Literary Awareness)

Ein interessantes, kann man sagen Gegenstück? zu Lukács‘ Totalitätsbegriff taucht beim Studium alter FBI-Akten zur „totalen“ Überwachung der schwarzen Literaturszene auf: „Total Literary Awareness“:

Half a century before the Pentagon’s controversial Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, an abandoned effort to aggregate and “data-mine” all electronic predictions of terrorist activity, the Bureau’s “TLA” program sought precocious knowledge of all published threats to the state—first among them threats to the state of the Bureau’s reputation.  Cold War Hooverism’s hyperactive counterliterary meddling thus did not end with the bowdlerization of State Department libraries abroad, enforced by Bureau crony Roy Cohn during a 1953 tour of European capitals.  Back in the U.S.A., the impulse was to know enough of domestic publishing to screen suspicious books before they reached the shelves. (…)

Critical nonfiction was the initial target of the Bureau’s Cold War campaign to impose itself between unflattering portraiture and the reading public.  Yet the FBI’s individual author files of the period, only recently extracted through FOIA requests, demonstrate that Total Literary Awareness also kept a special watch over African-American drama, fiction, and poetry. (…)

Author-critic J. Saunders Redding, investigated by the Bureau from 1953 to 1968, managed to produce To Make a Poet Black (1939), a landmark social history of African-American literature, without Bureau pre-knowledge.  The success of his post-passing novel Stranger and Alone (1950), however, left him with jealous acquaintances willing to talk to the FBI, nameless cronies prone to recommending “that any writing or lecturing done by the applicant be reviewed before being presented” (27 Feb. 1953). The need for such vigilance stemmed not from Redding’s hedged attraction to Communism, but from the ambiguous politics of his passionate intensity, the product of an artistic temperament supposedly marinated in racial grievance.  “[A] person who is very emotional and high-strung,” these “traits come out in his writings, which deal with the disadvantages and handicaps of being a Negro,” and are thus subject to interpretation “in a very different light than the author may have intended to impart” (27 Feb. 1953).  Willard Motley’s file, a toxic amalgam of Bureau fascinations with black cosmopolitanism and black queerness, nears its 1967 conclusion with news of the novelist’s withering life in Mexico, stranded abroad by the homosexuality “provisions…of the Immigration and Nationality Act” (18 Mar.1954).

/ From: Total Literary Awareness: How the FBI Pre-read African American Writing. By WILLIAM J. MAXWELL, The American Reader