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Chapter 7 - Espionage and Paths of Black Radicalism

from II - Culture and Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2022

By
GerShun Avilez
Edited by
Shelly Eversley
Shelly Eversley
Affiliation:
Baruch College, The City University of New York
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Summary

This chapter provides an assessment of the shifting terrain of 1960s-era political radicalism through an analysis of Sam Greenlee’s novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969/1973). It argues that the novel employs and challenges recognizable Civil Rights and Black Power discourses of social change to destabilize institutionalized racism and socio-economic discrimination and to begin to imagine untested paths to resistance. The chapter also considers how Greenlee uses espionage to reconfigure familiar political ideals and modes of leadership and to explore how the imagined integration of the CIA becomes a device for critiquing employment discrimination and the state’s half-hearted deployment of affirmative action. It closes by showing how spy training and spycraft offer Greenlee opportunities to rethink the connections among gender, sexuality, and revolution, while additionally illustrating how heterosexual masculinity dominates the space of the revolutionary. Through the frame of espionage, Greenlee reimagines Black identity and activism.

Keywords

Affirmative actionBlack radicalismBlack Powercivil rightsespionagemartial artsqueerredresssexualitytokenism
Type
Chapter
Information
African American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970
Black Art, Politics, and Aesthetics
 , pp. 173 - 198
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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