Raising Malcolm’s Ghost: Black Radicalism, Third World Internationalism, and Counterintelligence in Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy

Abstract

This article considers the “warring ideals” (Du Bois, Souls of Black Folks) of Black American solidarity with Third World Internationalism and complicity in U.S. imperialism through a reading of Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy (2019). The novel, a spy thriller, centers on the life and experience of Marie Mitchell, a Black woman FBI agent recruited by the CIA to further an assassination plot against Thomas Sankara, the charismatic socialist leader of Burkina Faso. The story puts individual career advancement in the service of American imperialism in direct tension with the larger collectivist goals of Black and Third World liberation. Thus, the novel invites an exploration of the geopolitical implications of Du Bois’s famous formulation about Black American double consciousness, a formulation most often considered solely as a matter of individual psychology.