A Tribute to Professor Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr.: Professor Emeritus of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst

My tribute to Joseph Skerrett begins by drawing people’s attention to his early and excellent 1975 Yale dissertation, entitled Take My Burden Up: Three Studies of Afro American Fiction. There and in articles derived from it one gets a solid sense of his many talents that flourished as his interests broadened during his thirty-year academic career. [The full text of his dissertation is available at the Thesis and Dissertation Database website, available in most research libraries.]

Skerrett’s dissertation focuses on James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. He describes his methodology as “psychobiographical criticism” and credits the theoretical work of Kenneth Burke and Harold Bloom for informing his critical perspective. His essays approach the three authors in different ways, often incorporating psychology, sociology, and cultural anthropology to illuminate his subject.

His essay on Johnson explores the relationship between the nameless narrator of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Johnson’s only novel, and his autobiography, Along This Way, published over twenty years later. The essay explores the ambivalence towards black identity, both in Johnson’s fiction and in his life history. His essay on Wright describes the author’s psycho-social situation. Examining Black Boy and Native Son, he addresses how Wright’s fiction enabled him to express his ambivalence towards his mother and other female authority figures. By killing two women—one white, one black—Bigger Thomas achieves a sense of freedom from repression embedded both in his own black culture and in the white racist society that surrounds it. His third essay discusses Ralph Ellison’s reading and criticism of Richard Wright. His distortions of Wright’s work are critical to understanding how Ellison came to envision an antithetical and competing image of Afro American culture.

After achieving this substantial and original scholarship Skerrett published articles and presented papers on other Afro American writers: James Baldwin, Paule Marshall, and Toni Morrison, to name a few. He chaired the MLA’s Executive Committee on Black American Literature and Culture in 1999.

While he never lost interest in Afro American literature, Skerrett broadened his scholarly focus to include issues of ethnicity and literature in America. He was elected President of the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States in 1984, and he served as editor of MELUS, the Society’s scholarly journal, from 1987 to 1999. With Amritjit Singh and Robert Hogan, he edited Memory, Narrative, and Identity: Essays in American Ethnic Literature (1994) and Memory and Cultural Politics (1995). In 2001 he published a book-length study, Literature, Race, and Ethnicity: Contesting American Identities.

Those of us fortunate enough to have known and worked with him recognize what an extraordinary person Joseph Skerrett was. A real polymath, he was able to examine issues from various, often quite different, perspectives, drawing, when appropriate, upon history, the social sciences, and even popular culture. He was an avid movie-goer, a talented cook, a wonderful gardener, and a fan of grand opera. He loved people as he loved life. And the mantle of his learning rested easily upon his shoulders. He enjoyed talking with students about their everyday lives, interests, and concerns. He was as eager to learn from them as he was to have them learn from him.