Citizen-Spy

Introduction xxxvii
The final two chapters are case studies of two of the most critically and
commercially successful spy programs of the 1960s. Though neither invokes
the authoritative documentary discourses of the previous decade, both participate
in important redefinitions of American identity in the context of the
international 1960s. Chapter 5 explores how the American civil rights movement
was folded into dominant definitions of American national identity. Airing
alongside the spy parodies U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart, I Spy straddles a
tumultuous period for both the civil rights movement and the decolonization
of the developing world. As African American activists began to look outside
the United States for political and cultural affiliations—to anticolonial movements
in Africa, to the Marxist theories of Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon,
and to Islam—I Spy contributed to the formation of a black American political
sensibility that was resolutely American in origin. Far from being exhausted of
its nationalistic pull, here the figure of the spy is mobilized amid shifting social
conditions to reassert the viability of a historically constituted ideal American
subject. At a moment of anxiety over pan-Africanism, I Spy constructs a distinctly
American black subjectivity, founded in discourses of American liberalism
and enriched by class mobility and leisure. The program was one of the
earliest instantiations of what Herman Gray calls the “civil rights subject,” a
reductive trope of African American identity that is detached from international
political and cultural movements and anchored instead to foundational
American national ideals of self-determination and individual liberties. 40
In a sense, then, I Spy represents a new form of containment narrative, one that
symbolically incorporates African Americans into the American national body
in order to mitigate pan-African critiques of American racism.
Issues of internationalism and the implications of U.S. interventionism
converge in Mission: Impossible, which is discussed in chapter 6. The program,
itself only the second network drama with an African American costar, navigates
a delicate path between jingoistic American paternalism and benevolent
internationalism. During this period of newly emergent nations and pluralized
global identities, the program devoted prodigious energy to researching its representations
of cultures abroad. As global media infrastructures developed in
the 1960s, international distribution became increasingly important to U.S.
television networks and studios. This growing market led producers to craft each