Joe Skerrett and MELUS at UMass Amherst: An Appreciation

I must begin with Chester County, Pennsylvania (of which the city of West Chester is the county seat), for its coincidental role in my meeting Joe. As an undergraduate in the mid-1960s at Lincoln University in southern Chester County, I chanced to meet an elder referred to simply as "Mr. Skerrett." He resided with one of the university employees whose house was walking distance from the campus on the narrow street through the tiny settlement we students called "the Ville"; the house faced a tiny post office. On a trip to that post office, I waved to him sitting on the porch, and something about him drew me across the street to say hello. He told me his grandniece was a freshman at the college and that he was from the West Indian island of Montserrat. When I later met Joe, I learned that this man was his uncle and the young woman his cousin. Mr. Skerrett and his nephew shared affable dispositions, and Fate had connected our paths. Who knew I would eventually review books for MELUS at Joe's invitation and that he would invite me to apply for a position in the English department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught and where I was fortunate to join him in 1992 to teach general American and Native American literatures?

That path in academia began something like this. Katherine Newman founded MELUS in 1973, early in the academic movement to open the American literature canon to multi-ethnic and multicultural inclusion. That same year, I chaired a New England Modern Language Association session in which Joe Skerrett and Joseph Bruchac presented. Katherine attended it and recruited us on the spot. We emerged into the frosty afternoon all smiling from mutual elation, and I especially remember the smile on Joe Skerrett's boyish face. We were among her earliest recruits, and Katherine had a way of making us feel that we were going to be part of something special. Hindsight may be tricky, but Joe's smile, with us bundled up at the threshold between interior warmth and the cold outdoors, seemed to foreshadow a new vista of serious literary study and critical activity.

Katherine and Joe shepherded MELUS from routine end-run sorties against the pedagogical establishment to gaining enlightened respect for the important scholarship and scrutiny that gives MELUS accountability and leadership in the field. We have Joe Skerrett to thank for his enormous contributions to MELUS and to literary scholarship, for he assumed editorship of the journal in 1987. Over time, Joe became caretaker of the organization's primary documents, its organizational memory, which he left in the American Studies office when he retired in 2009 and which I salvaged when our department was packing to relocate to another building in January 2017. Included are correspondences (sometimes contentious) between Newman and others, budgets, exchanges about the importance of the MELUS organization being represented at other academic annual meetings, Newman's desire that members aggressively recruit for MELUS, and her insistence that multi-ethnic literature not be confined to the usual suspects. MELUS's issues attest to the breadth its name denotes.

Through MELUS and MELUS, Katherine Newman and Joe Skerrett fostered a level of serious scholarship on multi-ethnic literatures, providing a platform that scholars and writers needed in order to engage topics about authors and their writings that conventional teaching and scholarship were neglecting or were tepid about including. Established academic journals resisted these new voices and critical methodologies and were hesitant about embracing authors, both historical and contemporary, whom the new generation of scholars and their sympathetic mentors championed and brought out of the shadows. Newman and Skerrett fine-tuned the MELUS objectives from the trenches of this new force in American literary studies, working hard within the Modern Language Association, American literature, and American studies organizations to gain respect for it. UMass Amherst was perfectly suited for Joe to engage in this work. The colleagues he left on his retirement in 2009 and his sudden and sad demise in 2015 knew his reputation for possessing...