E3W Literature | University of Texas

Gene Andrew Jarrett
Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007
232 pages
$47.50

Reviewed by Andrea Hilkovitz

What makes a text African American? Does its author need to self-identify as African American? Must African American literature feature black characters or reflect black experiences? Boston University professor Gene Andrew Jarrett argues that the twin doctrines of racial authenticity and experiential authority are at the center of current definitions of African American literature. He uses the term “racial realism” to refer to the use of black characters, settings, and vernaculars by black authors to authenticate their texts as “black.” In Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature, Jarrett traces the development of the African American canon through a series of literary schools of racial realism and the “deans” who presided over them. By reading each movement in counterpoint with a contemporaneous “truant” author who resisted racial realism, Jarrett historicizes the rhetoric of racial realism and analyzes the dialectic tension through which aesthetic power was negotiated in the formation of the African American literary canon.

Spanning the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, Deans and Truants examines four movements and counter-movements in the evolution of racial realism by focusing on a succession of critics and authors who defined the parameters of the genre. Together, these “deans” of African American literature—William Dean Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka—codified the aesthetics of racial realism. Black authors who wrote against the standards set forth by these deans risked critical dismissal and commercial obscurity; their work has routinely been dismissed as “assimilationist” or “white,” and they have largely been excluded from anthologies of African American literature. Against the standards of racial realism and its call for authentic representations of the race, “truant” writers—Paul Laurence Dunbar, George Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison—wrote “anomalous” texts that resisted the paradigms imposed on black literature. Jarrett claims that anomalous texts demonstrate a familiarity with and resistance to the discourse of racial realism, and that through them truant authors consciously indicted the authority of the so-called deans of African American literature.

Beginning with the 1890s, Jarrett argues in chapter one that William Dean Howells’s review of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Majors and Minors (1895) codified the rhetoric of authenticity and the aesthetics of late-nineteenth century Negro realism. In basing his praise of Dunbar’s dialect poems on the poet’s seeming racial purity and encouraging him to write in “entirely black verse,” Howells explicitly tied racial authenticity to aesthetic value. Jarrett contends that, like many truant writers, Dunbar was pigeonholed by the forces that legitimated his dialect poems, and he soon came to feel that Howells’s review had done him more harm than good. In chapter two, Jarrett argues that Dunbar responded to Howells and the Negro realist tradition with his first novel, The Uncalled (1898), which deemphasized race in the pursuit of a common national literature. While New Negro realism would employ the rhetoric of racial uplift to critique the minstrel tradition, Dunbar’s anomalous realism experimented with naturalism in order to counter the racialism of Howells’s minstrel realism and the “cultural monism” of uplift ideology.

In chapter three, Jarrett asserts that Alain Locke’s New Negro modernism redefined realism as folk authenticity. Though Locke rejected Howells’s minstrel realism and generally dismissed black literature written in dialect, he nonetheless encouraged a proximity to the folk that employed an essentialist discourse of racial authenticity. At the same time, claims Jarrett, Locke critiqued black artists whose cosmopolitanism conflicted with the “racial-nationalist protocol” of New Negro modernism. Jarrett contends in chapter four that George Schuyler’s essay “The Negro Art Hokum,” in which Schuyler dismisses the notion of an authentic black aesthetic tradition, served as the self-conscious and satirical truant to Locke’s New Negro modernism. According to Jarrett, Schuyler disavowed the racialism and cultural pluralism of the Harlem Renaissance by disingenuously subordinating race to regionalism and nationality as markers of identity.

Chapter five examines Richard Wright’s reformulation of Locke’s New Negro realism as New Negro radicalism. Jarrett argues that, in contrast to the Harlem Renaissance’s romantic construction of the folk and emphasis on individualism, the dean of the Chicago Renaissance encouraged black intellectuals to develop a class consciousness and to see themselves as spokesmen for the race. According to Jarrett, black literary expression became further limited with the critical success of Native Son (1940), as radical realism became the blueprint for black writing to the detriment of a generation of black writers. In chapter six, Jarrett contends that Frank Yerby rejected the responsibilities and restrictions placed on black writing by Wright’s New Negro radicalism, espousing instead an anomalous aesthetic that abandoned racial material for more universally American themes. Whereas Wright emphasized the importance of environment on human behavior, Yerby used the conventions of the historical and romance novels to explore themes of American individualism and racial reconciliation.

The final stage of racial realism that Jarrett examines is the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ‘70s and Amiri Baraka’s formulation of the “Black Aesthetic” in the anthologies Black Fire (1968), Black Expression (1969), and Confirmation (1983). In chapter seven, Jarrett asserts that the Black Arts Movement perpetuated notions of racial authenticity and advocated for a racially authentic art in an effort to combat racism disguised as universalism. In the same chapter, Jarrett reads Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” as an anomalous response to the Black Aesthetic’s “racial-realist ideologies.” Jarrett argues that Morrison’s story deliberately confuses the racial identity of her characters, “resisting the conventional literary overdetermination of race” and deconstructing the fiction of racial unity in the African American community.

While Jarrett’s decision to conclude his study with Morrison evinces his coterminous concern with accommodating “literature beyond race,” it is unfortunate that Jarrett ends his analysis with this relatively brief seventh chapter, the only one in his book to combine a discussion of a movement and counter-movement into a single section. As Jarrett mentions in his dissertation, which he developed into Deans and Truants, African American women writers “such as Victoria Earle Matthews and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in the 1890s, Jessie Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston in the New Negro era, and Gwendolyn Brooks and Ann Petry in the post-World War II era” and African American “gay or gay-conscious writers [such] as Richard Bruce Nugent, Willard Motley, and James Baldwin” played an important role in critiquing and negotiating the contours of racial realism. It might have been advantageous to develop at more length the ways in which such writers have consistently critiqued racial realism. A discussion of racial realism, its proponents, and its detractors since the 1980s would also have added a welcome perspective on current debates about multiculturalism, ethnocentrism, and critical race studies.

Notwithstanding, Jarrett’s study is an important reconsideration of the subject of canon formation and expansion. By persuasively demonstrating the dialectical relationship whereby truant authors and anomalous texts helped to shape the tradition they contested, Jarrett urges us to re-think the construction of anthologies so as to include as part of the African American literary tradition works that have previously been considered outside of that tradition. Published in tandem with African American Literature Beyond Race: An Alternative Reader (2006), which recovers sixteen marginal and previously out-of-print texts that offer new perspectives on more canonical works, Deans and Truants insists that we redefine African American literature as, in the words of Victoria Earle Matthews, “not necessarily race matter,” and that we begin to accommodate literature beyond race in the ways African American literature is marketed, sold, catalogued, and taught.