Gene Jarrett

Gene Jarrett will become the third Connelly Lecturer in Fall 2009. During his visit to Grinnell, he will deliver the following talks.

Proofs of Genius: Thomas Jefferson, David Walker, and the Politics of Early African American Literature

In this talk, I explore the question: What was the political value of literature written by Africans and their descendants in the New World? I argue that, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the white and black intellectuals who debated this question politicized African American literature, but not merely along the presumable lines of white racism, on the one hand, and black radicalism, on the other. Rather, the intellectuals meditated in complex ways on the roles literacy and intelligence played in the political representation of African Americans. By looking at the text and context of Thomas Jefferson's 1785 Notes on the State of Virginia, I show that this Founding Father's dismissal of the literary ability of blacks to demonstrate "proofs of genius" implicitly argued that reason and imagination were central to the early American polity. David Walker's 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World recognized Jefferson's logic when other historians and writers of early America did n ot. Walker refuted better than any other black writer of his generation the cultural and political implications, as opposed to the premise, of Jefferson's condemnation of African American writers.

Inside History: Barack Obama and the Politics of African American Literary History

In this talk, I explore the question: What is the political value of African American literature in the new millennium? I begin with Barack Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, to examine how he grappled with the ongoing force of black nationalism while addressing and embodying the simultaneous philosophical shifts in race, literature, politics, and nation. Analogous to Ralph Ellison's political revision of African American history, Obama has revised the political mythology of Malcolm X, for example, to tell more complex, nuanced, and universal stories of human change. At the same time, Obama has developed a new brand of American politics that encourages interracial reconciliation, even as it realistically tempers the phenomenal belief that we are in a "post-racial" world. As only the third African American to serve in the United States Senate since Reconstruction in the late nineteenth century, and as the first such person to become President of the United States, Obama is the most politically suc cessful and socially significant writer to "represent the race" in the realms of both formal and informal, or governmental and cultural, politics. He has built on the accomplishments of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements of the second half of the twentieth century, yet he has also overcome some of their myths of race and politics that exist, in the words of his memoir, "outside history, without a script or plot that might insist on progression."