Performativity, as the term will be used here, signifies the enactment of a role that one knows to be expected under given circumstances. Whether or not such role-playing is conscious or intentional, it indicates a choice, one that enables others to form an opinion of the individual who makes it. Transactional analysis points out that all of us have ready to hand several personae from which to draw depending on the occasion and/or audience, but bracketing for the moment this truism it can be generalized that most people except those incapacitated by dissociative identity disorder, or schizophrenia, allow one mode of self-presentation to predominate in everyday life. That choice enables others with whom a person interacts to form an impression of his or her character and reliability. The wrong decision usually disqualifies one from further involvement in whatever agenda may already be in place.

Situations of this kind abound in the history of African-American literature, not least because black people, especially men, have been the victims of demeaning racial stereotypes, most blatantly in the blackface minstrel shows of the nineteenth century and continuing through the end of World War II in vaudeville theater. The title of Ralph Ellison's landmark novel Invisible Man (1952) captures the black male's cultural status in the years leading up to Affirmative Action mandates in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. By the end of that decade, movements were afoot that threatened the United States with massive upheaval. The nonviolent Civil Rights Movement of 1954 to 1968, associated with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was challenging a segregationist legacy backed by Jim Crow laws; then, toward the end of that initiative, the Black Panther Party founded in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton was calling for armed insurrection. If allowance is made for that thumbnail sketch of the era, Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969) still resonates more than half a century after its release, not least of all, as this article contends, because the narrative presents a fascinating case study of the dialectic between performativity and agency.

Having begun with a working definition of the former term, let us define the latter as well. Although ironically used to indicate a corporate and bureaucratic entity such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the noun also signifies the autotelic latitude to act according to what is right or appropriate given one's own set of values. Such choices may or may not be congruent with the expectations of a supervening collective, but they attest to how a person's moral character is usually appraised. Realizing as we must that all volition is shaped by a myriad of conditioning factors, not all of which can be known, we yet tend to valorize the individual whose actions attest to his or her adherence to a standard we can both share and admire. The exercise of agency, so construed, demonstrates personal integrity.

The dialectic involving performativity and agency in Spook elevates Greenlee's novel to the standing of a minor classic in twentieth-century American fiction.¹ The relatively few facts provided about protagonist Dan Freeman's background indicate that he is perceived by a coterie of upwardly aspiring blacks as "a product of the Chicago ghetto," though one who managed to earn degrees from Michigan State University as well as the University of Chicago, and that he received a Reserve Officers' Training Corps commission before serving in the Korean War (13). Born during the Great Depression, Freeman is described as being among those "second-generation immigrants of refugee families from the Deep South," often referred to as the Great Migration (38). Aside from this sketchy vita, the most significant datum about Dan Freeman in the fictional present is that he has cultivated skills in chameleonic dissemblance. Thus, before being hired as the first African American employed by the CIA, he reflects that "Whitey will be more likely to ignore a nigger who approaches the stereotype than these others [members of what Greenlee calls the 'black bourgeoisie'] who think imitation the sincerest form of flattery" (12). As a recruitment candidate, Freeman consequently speaks with a limited vocabulary and dresses in discount Robert Hall suits. He also prevails on a dentist friend to provide him with a gold-rimmed tooth cap.

All these subterfuges relate to Greenlee's final title for his book. Although in manuscript form it was The Nigger Who Sat by the Door, the author decided that "spook" was a clever word because "Spooks are black people who allegedly are afraid of ghosts, and CIA undercover agents are called spooks" (Martin and Wall, "'Duality'" 35). Beyond this twofold denotation, Samantha N. Sheppard points out that the term conveys, as a third meaning, "the psychological fears of an armed Black resistance that haunts white America's consciousness" (92).² These semantic implications surface in the novel itself, starting with an observation by Senator Gilbert Hemmington's pollster aide that "If [the] CIA does select a Negro, he'll be the best-known spy since 007," alluding to James Bond as first popularized by Ian Fleming in 1953 (5). Adept at fading into the background when doing so serves his strategic purposes, Freeman has mastered the tactics of invisibility and self-erasure.

Spook's early chapters establish this dimension of its focal character by sketching some racial antitypes. When summoned to a caucus of advisors to Senator Hemmington, a white liberal facing a close reelection, Carter Summerfield is profiled as a "professional Negro" who always does his level best to anticipate what his employer wishes him to parrot (3).³ Greenlee's scorn for this careerist functionary is replicated by Freeman's disdain for the other African Americans who comprise the CIA's trial group of minority candidates. All members of the "black elite" who have benefited from nepotism, they pepper the protagonist with questions about his background while casually dropping the names of "Great Negro Leaders I have known" and rattling off those of such consumerist brands as "GE, Magnavox, Ford, GM, Chrysler, Zenith, Brooks Brothers, Florsheim, Johnny Walker, Chivas Regal, Jack Daniel's" (9). The complicating irony, as I will explore later, is that in his subsequent presentation as a Marxist revolutionary Dan Freeman is sometimes described in terms of the same preferences. At the novel's outset, though, he silently derides such name-dropping as symptomatic of a racial sellout: "Blow your bourgeois blues, your nigger soul sold for a mess of materialistic pottage" (10).

Only at the end of the second chapter does Freeman's mask slip while he is part of the CIA's experiment in African-American recruitment. When singled out for humiliation by a racist instructor in hand-to-hand combat, the 168-pound Freeman who has a brown belt in judo musters all his strength to "kick this ofay's ass" (18). By the end of their second five-minute bout, the heavier Calhoun suffers a dislocation of the right shoulder and shortly thereafter requests an overseas assignment before disappearing into the Middle East. Following this incident of yielding to his pent-up fury, Greenlee's dissembler reflects that he "would have to be more careful; there were holes in his mask. He would have to repair them" (19). The rest of the novel revolves in large measure around whether it is possible for Dan Freeman to remain true to that resolution.

Almost immediately, once chosen for affiliation with the CIA, Freeman cultivates the double life of an undercover operative. Granted a few days of leave before activation, though his only job at Langley headquarters is to photocopy bureaucratic reports in a windowless room, he establishes what in espionage fiction is sometimes called a "bolt-hole":

He drove to an all-Negro housing development just across the Anacostia River and applied for a one-bedroom apartment. He then drove to New York and checked into the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. He made the rounds of the Harlem bars the first evening, before heading downtown to the jazz joints. His Robert Hall suit and too-pointy shoes were in the hotel closet, his gold-edged tooth cap in a plastic container in the bathroom, a plain one replacing it. He wore black-rimmed glasses of plain glass, cordovan bluchers, a button-down shirt of English oxford and a dark sharkskin suit from J. Press.

He saw Thelonius Monk at the Five Spot, the band with Johnny Griffin, Charlie Mingus at the Village Gate. He saw Threepenny Opera in the Village and Five-Finger Exercise, The Night of the Iguana, and I Can Get It for You Wholesale on Broadway. He visited the newly opened Guggenheim and decided that Wright had goofed, but he enjoyed the Kandinskys. He visited the galleries on Fifty-seventh Street and the Museum of Modern Art. (22-23)

Meanwhile, upon returning to the District of Columbia, he spends time each weekend with a prostitute in a ghetto hotel near U Street. Dubbed by Freeman the "Dahomey queen" after a centuries-old West African kingdom that in 1958 became a self-governing French colony before achieving independence, she plays a significant role in the novel's dramatization of black militancy and self-reclamation (28). While on the job at CIA headquarters, though, Dan Freeman continues his masquerade as a hard-working functionary who occasionally is allowed to lead tour groups of elected politicians while lauding the agency's "vital task as watchdog of the Communist conspiracy" (31). Because of commendations by those visitors, he is appointed "special assistant to the director" and "given a glass-enclosed space in the director's suite. His job was to be black and conspicuous as the integrated Negro of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America" (34). Excelling in that performative role, Greenlee's chameleonic hero achieves his short-term goal: "No one ever blew Freeman's cover. They accepted at face value what he appeared to be, because he became what they wanted him to be" (34).

Part of the price that Dan Freeman pays in his new persona is a rift with a woman he has known since their undergraduate years together at Michigan State University. Identified only as Joy, she, in the novel's chronological present, visits him almost monthly and while in bed together voices concern about his embittered "preoccupation with the race thing" (35). Although he suggests marriage, Joy is adamant that having escaped the Detroit slums she cannot share his militant idealism and is not about to abandon her aspirations for upward mobility.⁴ Subsequently the text discloses that Joy married "a tall, light-skinned Negro named Frank, who...was the Negro quota at a local medical school and [whose] father was a prominent society doctor who made most of his money – tax free – selling dope to jazz musicians and performing abortions for Negro debutantes" (40-41). When Dan encounters Joy again a few chapters later, she has learned to accept her husband's serial infidelity for the sake of the privileged life that is now hers.

At this juncture, Spook pivots. After five years of enacting his Uncle Tom role with the CIA and "mov[ing] through Washington like an invisible man," Freeman finds himself favored by the general who heads the organization, even accompanying him several times to Saigon as the Vietnam War escalates. During this last phase of his employment, Freeman "studied the reports of the guerilla fight in Algeria, particularly as confined to urban centers; the guerilla war against the Huks in the Philippines; the guerilla war against the Malayan Communists; the tactics of the Viet Cong; the theories of Giap and Mao Tse-tung" (44). All this background in revolution overseas strengthens Freeman's understanding of what is possible in countering racial oppression in the United States. His resolve on that point is cemented when, after lunch with the general who admonishes Dan that "[y]our people must demonstrate a respect for law and order, earn the respect and affection of whites," Freeman sees on the six o’clock news scenes of mounted cops charging children while deploying police dogs, cattle prods, and firehoses. "It was time," he decides, "to stop procrastinating, time to do what he had to do" (46).

The protagonist's last day as a government employee clarifies his tactical invisibility at the CIA. Emphasized again is sartorial appearance coupled with a submissive demeanor:

He was dressed in quiet bad taste, his suit a bit too light, his cuffs a bit too deep, lapels a bit too wide, shoulders a shade too padded, tie too broad, trousers too wide at the knee and ankle, socks too short. He wore large airplane-type sunglasses, his hair was closely cropped...and there was a thin surrounding of gold around a front tooth. His suit was a bit too cheap and his wristwatch, of eighteen-karat gold, a bit too expensive. He walked with a gangling shuffle, his head tilted slightly toward one shoulder...and there was always a smile on his face.... (50)

While in this guise, Freeman meets briefly with the U.S. President for a farewell ceremony, and Greenlee makes clear that the unnamed figure is Lyndon B. Johnson by a sardonic reference to "our Great Society" (52). When the politician, who repeatedly addresses Freeman as "Foreman," presents Dan with a multipurpose pocket knife, the same as that which he had just handed out to a delegation of East Bengali boy scouts, the satirical interlude is complete. After leaving the White House, however, the former CIA spook thinks to himself: "[N]ow he was ready. Or was he? Had his mask become him?" (55).

Devoting a full chapter to Spook in her book titled Invisibility in African American and Asian American Literature: A Comparative Study, Klara Szmanko explains how masquerade was instrumental in black nationalist struggles.⁵ Positing that although Dan Freeman can "employ literal invisibility as a weapon against his oppressors," she concludes with an insight that anticipates the thrust of my essay: "Even though Freeman keeps a separate identity, he is not sure whether he is still able to say who he is. Putting on different masks and playing practically before everyone, he wonders if his cover has not at least partially merged with his identity. All his masks in a sense become part of him" (79, 88). This issue comes squarely to the fore at the beginning of the second section when the "new Freeman, J. Pressed and Brooks button-downed," boards a flight from New York to Chicago in order to work for the South Side Youth Foundation as a liaison with street gangs such as the Cobras (57). As a teenager, Dan was once a Cobra "warlord" known as Turk, but in his present incarnation he knows how to ingratiate himself with the white liberals who comprise the foundation's board. To reinforce his new cover, Freeman makes sure that his apartment in Chicago reflects the man who lives there:

He drank and served Chivas Regal, Jack Daniel's Black Label, Beefeater gin, Rémy Martin, Carlsberg, Heineken, Labatt and Ballantine. He had matching AR speakers in teak cabinets, Garrard changer with Shure cartridge and a Fisher solid-state amp with seventy-five watts power per channel. A Tandberg stereo tape recorder, a color television set, which could be played through the stereo system, and videotape completed the system. (60)

The proliferation of consumerist brand names in this passage signifies how familiar Freeman is with the pretensions of the "white-type, uptight Negro of 'rising aspirations'" (60). While the account limns Dan's awareness of the predilections that befit his undercover role, a crisis will come at the novel's midpoint when he wonders, "How long before the edges of his cover and those of his personality would blur, merge, and he could no longer tell where one began and the other ended?" (82).

Meanwhile, his performativity again comes into play when Freeman, in his off hours, confronts the Cobras' current leadership – Do-Daddy Dean, Sugar Hips Scott, Stud Davis – by usurping their turf at a South State Street poolroom and, relying again on his skills in judo, subdues them in a back alley. "You really want to f--- with whitey," he challenges them, "I'll show you how!’" (65). During the daytime, Dan Freeman continues his imposture with the South Side Youth Foundation, but at night and on weekends he methodically begins teaching the gang fundamental lessons in an effective underground revolutionary movement, one that can "turn this country upside down" (72). As part of his mentoring, Dan also admonishes his young charges, who revere him, that in order for an insurrection to succeed no figurehead or leader is indispensable. While imparting these tutorials, however, Freeman finds that "his loneliness ate at him like a cancer. Always the iron control, even when drunk, the cover everything, himself nothing" (75). The paragraph immediately following this passage begins: "Only with the Cobras could he be open, but he knew he used them as well" (75). Performativity in the service of a cause that transcends the individual here hollows out autonomous agency. Midway through his novel, Greenlee reveals the unavoidable toll of commitment to an ideological imperative such as Marxian insurgency.

In an article of 1971 titled "The Black Revolutionary Novel: 1899-1969," Charles D. Peavy linked both Spook and John A. Williams's Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light, also published in 1969, to Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899). While organizing the urban guerilla force later known as the Black Freedom Fighters, Greenlee's main character allegedly "exhibits the cunning, zeal, and dedication characteristic of the hard-line revolutionary" (187). Left wholly out of Peavy's account, though, is Freeman's awareness that "the years of cover, constantly becoming someone different, finally wore away what he actually was, until he no longer knew what he was" (82). That ontological problem becomes the issue around which the narrative's second half revolves. Julie A. Fiorelli's study of apocalyptic race-war novels dating from the late 1960s, published in Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, recognizes how, in Spook, urban ghetto rebellion "reaches outward into the symbolic and infrastructural underpinnings of white capitalist society," but she also acknowledges how Dan Freeman "must maintain a cover identity not only to 'the man,' but [also] to his gang" (83). The ex-CIA employee's carefully honed skills in performativity now are undermining his sense of personal integrity, ironically at the same time as his mentorship of the Cobras is producing transformative results: "He taught them all the tricks of the trade....They had not been tested, but he had no doubt about their performance once they were" (83; italics added). A skeptical reading of Greenlee's manual of African-American insurgency might suggest that ideological persuasion is here being trumped by the multiple roles he plays.

That certainly is the view of Sandra Hollin Flowers based on the novel's attention to the expensive furnishings of Freeman's apartment: a "Javanese Buddha head of black volcanic stone," a "Saarinen womb chair," and a "Saito woodblock he had purchased in Tokyo" (141, 143, 182). Based on these artifacts and other evidence of the insurrectionist's tastes, Flowers avers that "of his three personae – the CIA agent who appears as gold-toothed bumpkin in pointy shoes, the Negro Playboy of the Western World, and the avenging black revolutionary – [Freeman] relishes most that of the Negro Playboy" (138). Be that as it may, "Freeman's consumption habits reveal...that despite his affiliation with the working class, he is a product of socialization in middle-class cultural institutions" (Román 77).⁶ From this point onward, Spook documents in considerable detail how Dan Freeman guides his Cobra understudies in fomenting an all-engulfing race riot in Chicago.

Before that conflagration erupts, the strategist's preparations attest to the methodical nature of his campaign. Grasping the importance of "establish[ing] an organization [that] would survive him" because once discovered "he would disappear" – "There would be no martyr-making trials,” he thinks, “and no more public assassinations as with Malcolm X" – Freeman devotes several intensive weeks to familiarizing the Cobras with their African-American heritage of poetry, music, and history (82). In the process, he "watched them...become more human and," in a touch of slant irony, "knew that their newfound humanity would not inhibit their becoming the killers he was training them to be" (83). His next step is to enlist Pretty Willie du Bois, a light-skinned member of the gang with a talent for writing, as propagandist. Once Freeman's protégés have "learn[ed] the lessons of the oppressed throughout history in striking back at their oppressors," he decides that it is time for them to begin (102). In order to fund their campaign, he has the Cobras rob a shopping-center bank and assemble an arsenal by stealing weapons from a National Guard Armory. They then take advantage of a white cop's killing of a black teenager that summer on Chicago's South Side by instigating street riots supplemented by sniper fire from rooftops. When the mayhem reaches a point of no return, Freeman becomes convinced that the war's escalation will spread nationwide, having organized training units in other metropolitan centers. And so it happens. The final chapter of Greenlee's book begins as follows:

Oakland blew first, then Los Angeles, then, leapfrogging the continent, Harlem and South Philadelphia. After years of crying conspiracy, the witch hunters found, to their horror, there was a conspiracy afoot among the black masses...The most powerful nation in history stood on the brink of panic and chaos...Within a week there were major guerilla uprisings in eight major cities in the United States and efforts to eliminate them had proven futile. (179)

This coda, while supporting Peavy's categorization of Spook as a "black revolutionary novel," does not tell the whole story, however.

As early as the eleventh of its twenty chapters, the narrative introduces an African-American foil to Dan Freeman, a former friend and now a plainclothes police detective named Pete Dawson who has just returned from reading a paper on the "Chicago approach to riot control" at a California seminar (98). During a time when his other daytime associates "active in the 'movement'...remembered Freeman as a tireless firebrand in the struggle for civil rights" but who "now regarded him with contempt as a hopeless sellout," owing to how well he projected an image of the "Negro Playboy," Greenlee's protagonist risks exposure by trying to sway Dawson to his point of view, even thinking that his friend "would be a good man [who] could take over if they ever blew my cover" (102, 135). Accordingly, when the riot-weary detective opines that "without respect for law and order, we might as well be back in the jungle," Freeman comes close to revealing where he stands ideologically by replying: "[T[he ghetto's always been a jungle. You really think you can treat people like animals and not have them act like animals? You really believe you're just a cop and I'm just a social worker? Man, we're keepers of the zoo. You can't cage a whole race of people without asking for trouble" (132).

The novel ends, though, with a double peripeteia. As the nationwide riots continue, Joy spends a weekend at Freeman's upscale apartment, during which time, mentioning that her husband has lost his hospital appointment and that her job as a department-store buyer is also in jeopardy, she asks Dan whether he is complicit in the violence spawned by the Black Freedom Fighters. Skeptical of his denial, she reports him to police as the man who under the nom de guerre of "Uncle Tom" had been taunting authorities with ultimatums. The second reversal comes when Pete Dawson, having discovered a hidden cache of firearms in his friend's apartment, confronts him with a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver. During an ensuing struggle, Dawson wounds Freeman before the two grapple and Greenlee's protagonist chokes him to death. When one of Dan's lieutenants summoned to dispose of the body asks how he could kill his "main man," their mentor retorts: "Dawson's one dead black generation and you might be another, but at least you won't be dying an inch at a time...Freedom now! No more begging, pleading and silent suffering" (186).

Near the end of her introduction to a reissuance of her father's novel in 2022, Natiki Hope Pressley remarks that "Spook is his termination letter to institutional racism and a clarion call for true liberty and justice for all" (xii). Pressley's comment accords with Greenlee's response to the opening question by an interviewer for Black World in 1971 about why he wrote the book. "Well," he began, "because I had to" (Burrell 42). Pressed in a follow-up query about whether the probability that a majority of his readership would be white influenced the novel’s composition, its author replied bluntly: “I was determined that I was going to write a Black book for Black people with no attempt to translate or explain or illuminate for a white audience, however sympathetic or hostile, who might not understand exactly what I was saying” (Burrell 43). Like Williams's Sons of Darkness, Greenlee's narrative is a sterling example of what Kali Tal has explored as "black militant near-future fiction" (65). Nonetheless, contends Justin Mitchell, "as much as it celebrates Freeman's ‘vision for an egalitarian society,' Spook also romanticizes Black class privilege. As a result, the novel fails to cohere” (190). This schism becomes manifest, I would argue, in an incongruence between the book's first half documenting Dan Freeman's talent for subversive performativity, which is rewarded with access to the consumerist indulgences of a black bourgeoisie, and its second half tracing his systematic indoctrination of disaffected younger versions of himself, a role that undercuts his autonomous agency when Freeman kills a former friend whom he deems co-opted by a hegemonic white Establishment. If I am right in that assessment, Greenlee's exceptional novel of 1969 is yet, as Mitchell acknowledges, "profoundly instructive" (190).

Spook deserves such recognition because, as the same critic concludes, it "testifies most clearly to the hypothesis that race-group interest no longer resonates with the politics of social democracy" (197). GerShun Avilez, in an essay titled "Espionage and Paths of Black Radicalism," has recently analyzed Greenlee's narrative as "an artistic translation of the intellectual and social terrain of the Black Power Movement" in the late 1960s (173). At the end of his discussion, after noting an emphasis on militancy in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), Avilez concludes that "The Spook Who Sat by the Door is ultimately a novel about Black liminality" – that is to say, of "being on the threshold of change" (193). Given the long-overdue progress that has been made since then, who could disagree?

Notes

1. Several critical monographs recognize the importance of Greenlee's novel in relation to larger trends of the time. Among those studies that devote substantial parts of chapters to The Spook Who Sat by the Door are Erik Dussere's America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture (2013), Elda María Román's Race and Upward Mobility: Seeking, Gatekeeping, and Other Class Strategies in Postwar America (2018), and Sandra Hollin Flowers' African American Nationalist Literature of the 1960s: Pens of Fire (2019). Theodore Martin's PMLA article of 2021 discusses Spook in connection with President Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Crime," specifically "the racialization of crime and the criminalization of revolt" (215).
2. Samantha N. Sheppard's essay on Ivan Dixon's film adaptation of Spook, which was removed from theaters shortly after its release in 1973, originally appeared in Cinema Journal, vol. 52, no. 2, 2013, pp. 71-92.
3. "Summerfield," the same passage elaborates, "had sought desperately to discover what it was the senator wanted to hear in order that he might say it, and was amazed to find that the senator seemed annoyed when his own comments were returned, only slightly paraphrased."
4. When Freeman, in this scene, makes the case for racial solidarity, saying "Joy, have you forgotten you came off those same streets? Except for your college degree, those people are just like you," she vehemently retorts: "Not me, baby! I left that behind me: all those hot, stinky rooms, those streets full of ghosts. Junkies, whores, pimps, con men. The crooked cops, the phony, fornicating preachers. And the smells: garbage, stale sweat, stale beer, reefers, wine and funk. That bad, hand-me-down meat from the white supermarket, the price hiked up and two minutes this side of turning a buzzard's stomach. I’ve had that shit and going back won't change things" (36). In Joy's mind, as she goes on to urge Dan, cooperation with whites is not ipso facto a sellout.
5. See also theorist Efrat Tseëlon on masquerade as challenging essentialist categories of identity. Noting the tenuous distinctions among definitions of "mask," "disguise," and "masquerade" in the Oxford English Dictionary, Tseëlon summarizes: "The mask is partial covering; disguise is full covering; masquerade is deliberate covering. The mask hints; disguise erases from view; masquerade overstates. The mask is an accessory; disguise is a portrait; masquerade is a caricature" (2).
6. It should be acknowledged, though, that Greenlee's protagonist, as Román also points out, is aware of the temptation to embrace the black bourgeoisie's materialism: "Let's face it, [Freeman] thought, I like this shit. I drive a beautiful piece of machinery, drink good whiskey, wear good clothes and have more chicks than I really can handle. It would only take a little lying to myself to think I was really into something, tell myself I'd earned it all in the best Horatio Alger tradition" (144).

Works Cited 

Avilez, GerShun. "Espionage and Paths of Black Radicalism." African American Literature in Transition, 1960-1970, ed. Shelly Eversley, Cambridge UP, 2022, pp. 173-98.

Burrell, Walter. "Rappin' with Sam Greenlee." Black World, vol. 20, no. 9, 1971, pp. 42-47.

Dussere, Erik. America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture. Oxford UP, 2013.

Fiorelli, Julie A. "Imagination Run Riot: Apocalyptic Race-War Novels of the Late 1960s." Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, vol. 28, no. 1, 2014, pp. 127-51.

Flowers, Sandra Hollin. African American Nationalist Literature of the 1960s: Pens of Fire. Routledge, 2019.

Greenlee, Sam. The Spook Who Sat by the Door. 1969. Wayne State UP, 2022.

Martin, Michael T. and David C. Wall. "'Duality Is a Survival Tool. It's Not a Disease’: Interview with Sam Greenlee on The Spook Who Sat by the Door." Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in The Spook Who Sat by the Door, edited by Michael T. Martin, David C. Wall, and Marilyn Yaquinto, Indiana UP, 2018, pp. 28-59.

Martin, Theodore. "War-on-Crime Fiction." PMLA, vol. 136, no. 2, 2021, pp. 213-28.

Mitchell, Justin. "Racial and Social Democracy in Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat by the Door." American Literary History, vol. 35, no. 1, 2023, pp. 187-200.

Peavy, Charles D. "The Black Revolutionary Novel: 1899-1969." Studies in the Novel, vol. 3, no. 2, 1971, pp. 180-89.

Pressley, Natiki Hope. Introduction. The Spook Who Sat by the Door, by Sam Greenlee. Wayne State UP, 2022, pp. ix-xii.

Román, Elda María. Race and Upward Mobility: Seeking, Gatekeeping, and Other Class Strategies in Postwar America. Stanford UP, 2018.

Sheppard, Samantha N. "Persistently Displaced: Situated Knowledges and Interrelated Histories in The Spook Who Sat by the Door." Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in The Spook Who Sat by the Door, edited by Michael T. Martin, David C. Wall, and Marilyn Yaquinto, Indiana UP, 2018, pp. 92-120.

Szmanko, Klara. Invisibility in African American and Asian American Literature: A Comparative Study. McFarland, 2008.

Tal, Kali. "'That Just Kills Me': Black Militant Near-Future Fiction." Social Text, vol. 20, no. 2, 2002, pp. 65-91.

Tseëlon, Efrat. "Introduction: Masquerade and Identities." Masquerade and Identities: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Marginality, edited by Efrat Tseëlon, Routledge, 2003, pp. 1-17.