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- Title
Friendship in the Time of COINTELPRO: Clarence Major and Dingane Joe Goncalves.
- Authors
Tolle, Yeshua G B
- Abstract
In the era of COINTELPRO (1956-71), the FBI's counterintelligence program designed to crush American radicalism, Black writers were disproportionately targeted. Through its surveillance and disinformation campaigns, the Bureau became intimately entwined in the production of Black literary culture. The failed friendship of novelist Clarence Major and poet and journal editor Dingane Joe Goncalves offers a look into the atmosphere of mistrust among mid-century Black writers that was created by surveillance and law enforcement. Combining biographical criticism with analysis of archival documents and periodicals, I tell the story of Major and Goncalves's friendship and falling-out to explore the impasses to personal and aesthetic relations in a world that tears Black life apart. Jacques Derrida's ruminations on the friend in the Western philosophical tradition provide a framework for my analysis, particularly his insights into the importance of disproportion, rather than equality, in the friend relation. I show how Major's and Goncalves's politics of art challenge and intermingle with their politics of friendship, and how solidarity versus aestheticism emerges as the conceptual axis of their estrangement. Yet their conceptual conflict only has salience once the psychic terrain of the era has been described. In fine, I ask: what does it take to have friends in a time of distrust?
- Subjects
MAJOR, Clarence, 1936-; AFRICAN American authors; FRIENDSHIP; UNITED States. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Counter Intelligence Program; MASS surveillance
- Publication
MELUS, 2022, Vol 47, Issue 3, p153
- ISSN
0163-755X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/melus/mlac059