Gene Jarrett
Postdoctoral Fellow, 2002-2003

Gene Andrew Jarrett is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in African-American literature and literary theory. He earned his A. B. in English from Princeton University in 1997 and his A. M. and Ph.D. in English from Brown in 1999 and 2002. Jarrett is the recipient of such awards as the Andrew Mellon Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities, the Leadership Alliance's Irene Diamond Predoctoral Fellowship, the Samuel Nabrit Dissertation Fellowship, an honorary fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and a non-resident fellowship from the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard. He has published articles and reviews in Callaloo, American Literary Realism, and The Black Scholar, and he is co-editing, along with Henry Louis Gates Jr., a forthcoming anthology of early twentieth-century African-American aesthetic and literary criticism, to be released by Perseus Press.

Fellow's Project Description
Racial Realism and Anomalies: African-American Literature and Its Discontents

As a postdoctoral fellow at the David C. Driskell Center for 2002-2003, I intend to work on my first book, Racial Realism and Anomalies: African-American Literature and Its Discontents. I argue that the tradition of African-American literature divides into two main groups, texts that display racial realism and texts that do not. Racial Realism re-defines what contemporary critics of African-American literature have generally called "Blackness," or those African or African-American protagonists, settings, customs, vernacular, and polemics incorporated in Black-authored texts and authenticating these texts as "Black." Racial Realism and Anomalies illuminates the historic priority of racial realism in the production, consumption, taxonomy, and canonization of African-American literature from the postbellum nineteenth century until the postwar 1940s. During this period, however, an anomalous tradition of African-American "discontents" has simultaneously formed. Protesting the tendency of American literary critics and publishers to pigeonhole African-American writers as racial realists, these discontents have proven their expertise in more mainstream Anglo-American genres such as "literary" realism, naturalism, and historical romance. Over the past century, American intellectuals have dismissed such texts as simply "White" and irrelevant to an understanding of the African-American literary tradition. Racial Realism and Anomalies disagrees, showing that the tradition evolved through the dialectical tension between texts of racial realism and texts that seem at first glance to have little or nothing to do with this historically "Black" aesthetic.

At the Driskell Center, I intend to elaborate a book chapter, "The Conventional Blindness of the Caucasian Eye: New Negro Realism and the Problem of Henry Ossawa Tanner." A tripartite approach to anomalies during the Harlem Renaissance (1920s), the chapter seeks to analyze how Alain Locke’s trope of the New Negro operated not only through the rhetoric of racial realism but also through cultural nationalism and pluralism, which envisioned the ethnic differentiation of American culture. Within this ideological framework, the Black aesthetician critiqued both the minstrel realism of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1890s) and the previous version of New Negro realism that arose from racial uplift theory at the turn of the century (1880s-1920s). I maintain that this critique condemned anomalous Black art and artists, namely the Black painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, for avoiding racial realism and perpetuating the "conventional blindness of the Caucasian eye." Secondly, against Locke's aesthetic philosophy, I will examine George Schuyler's notorious advocacy of American cultural monism, through which the Black iconoclast indicted the racial chauvinism of New Negro realism. I plan to show that when Schuyler called African Americans "lampblacked Anglo-Saxons," he was recovering those very anomalous African-American artists Locke condemned, including Dunbar and Tanner. By invoking the minstrel phenomenon Locke so despised, the phrase "lampblacked Anglo-Saxons" insinuated the inherent Whiteness of Blacks in order to ridicule the racial taxonomy of people and artistic traditions. Schuyler thereby recommended an aesthetic accommodating art by Blacks but not about Blacks. Finally, I will prove that Langston Hughes, through a racial nationalist promotion of Black beauty, collectivity, and pride, reiterated Locke's critique of Henry Ossawa Tanner in order to refute Schuyler. Specifically, Hughes indicted Schuyler for subordinating Black racial pride to Americanness, which to the Black poet figured Whiteness as the standard by which all else was measured. In the end, I hope to complicate the reductive ideological binary—assimilationism versus racial nationalism—into which scholars have often thrust the famous Schuyler-Hughes debate and the Harlem Renaissance. Instead, I envision a triangular ideological conversation on the subject of New Negro realism between Locke's cultural nationalism and pluralism, Schuyler's cultural monism, and Hughes's racial nationalism.