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This chapter illustrates how Toomer appears to have gleaned about his family's history while he was conceiving and creating Cane. This material features the fabulous fortune gained and lost by his father, Nathan Toomer, on the death of his second wife, the Georgia heiress Amanda America Dickson, said to be the “richest colored woman in America.” It also involves a near-Gothic narrative of attempted seduction and rape of his half-sister, Mamie Toomer, by her stepbrother, Charles Dickson. This buried family history gave rise to a complex admixture of shame and guilt that compounded Toomer's already conflicted consciousness as a pro-socialist radical born into Washington's light-skinned Negro aristocracy.

This chapter reads Jean Toomer, an American writer and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism, in the mestizo context of Greater Mexico and places him within the Harlem milieu and the wider New Negro movement. Toomer’s opus, Cane (1923), is considered the harbinger of New Negro literature. After Cane, Toomer is said to have left the New York literary scene behind and moved to the Southwest. In his essay “New Mexico after India,” Toomer describes an attachment to place—a feeling of home—that remains unsatisfied in Cane, where both the North and the South cannot accommodate the racially ambiguous. India is consistently mentioned in Toomer’s biography and southwestern writing, a reminder that the Southwest is engaged in the processes of modernization and racialization that exist not only in the place Toomer inhabits as “a small man in big spaces...between Taos and Santa Fe” but also in Harlem, Mexico, India, and other complex routes revealed in his southwestern archive.

African American modernists' works appropriated literary traditions as they sought to combat the lingering effects of postslavery in the United States, including systematic segregation, everyday violence such as widespread lynchings, and the racist hierarchies embedded within U.S. English. This chapter addresses wide‐ranging debates among African American intellectuals over the status of vernacular linguistic forms in literature. These public conversations produced diverse opinions on whether dialectical literary idioms could be recuperated and reappropriated by African American writers. As we know today, vernacular forms were revitalized, but this chapter focuses on two authors who sought to evade the absolutism of the “standard”/vernacular binary in favor of narratives that actively deessentialized the relations between language and race. Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen pursued complex visions of interracial modernism, and the linguistic strategies of their novels pose the question of what the literary idioms of internationalist, antiracist, multidialectical African American culture would be. Toomer's Cane and Larsen's Passing and “Sanctuary” portray modern African American languages as flexible, inventional, and antiessentialist forms of code switching.

This chapter examines how Toomer's interest in class-conscious radical politics was at best transitory and immature. Drawing on his early left-wing journalism, correspondence, handwritten 1936 autobiography, and psychoanalytic records from the late 1940s, the chapter argues that Toomer not only held strongly left-wing views during the Cane period but also remained in some respects a man of the left throughout his life. It also proposes that his social constructionist view of race, usually attributed to his situation as a light-skinned black man able to “pass,” is also traceable to his awareness of race as a product of capitalist exploitation and state-sanctioned racial violence—ideas that are allegorically displayed in his poem Banking Coal.

This chapter looks at how Toomer was more intimately involved with the New Negro Movement than he was able to acknowledge in his early 1920s correspondence with white modernists. Toomer was particularly influenced by a circle of African American women he had known from his youth, and whose writings—which were significantly influenced by postwar leftist debates—would shape Toomer's representations of womanhood and motherhood in Cane. Moreover, although attracted from 1920 onward by the notion of an “American race” transcending racial binaries, during the entire Cane period Toomer had no qualms about identifying himself as a Negro under conditions of his own choosing. As with Toomer's views on class politics, it is imperative to read forward through his early writings in order to determine the racial ideas that shaped the composition of Cane.

This chapter analyzes Toomer's relationship with the early 1920s modernists dubbing themselves “Young America”—particularly with novelist Waldo Frank, whose influential Our America (1919) advocated a pluralistic and experimental program for national cultural renewal. In this program, the notion of sectional art figured as a highly contradictory ideologeme, at once promising a strategy for including the nation's marginalized peoples and papering over the reasons for their exclusion. While it is proposed that Toomer retreated from Young America because of his distress at Frank's allusions to Toomer's African American ancestry in his foreword to Cane, the chapter argues that Toomer's growing skepticism about the possibility that cultural pluralism could produce social change is what caused his eventual break with Frank's project.

This chapter describes the ideal New Negro husband. After World War II, many men sought to claim the right to rule their households. The chapter examines three places where New Negro men constructed husband's roles: the pages of the magazine, Messenger; the writings of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier; and the unpublished journals and correspondence of the writer Jean Toomer.

This chapter focuses on “Kabnis,” which generally supplies the terminus, not the beginning, of most critical analyses of Cane. Composed in rough draft before Toomer left Middle Georgia in November 1921 and finished before the end of that year, Kabnis reflects Toomer's sense of felt urgency to reproduce his Georgia experiences with a combination of lyric intensity and journalistic precision. In Kabnis, history is felt as present cause; the text's unambiguous references to notorious documented episodes of lynching, accounting for Kabnis' tortured preference for “split-gut” over “golden” words, testify to the dilemma confronting the artist who would grapple with the Real of Jim Crow violence.

This chapter analyzes how many of the texts in part 1 of Cane display Toomer's continuing attempt to incorporate Sempter/Sparta into the program for sectional art that had failed to achieve effective expression in “Kabnis.” While things are so immediate in the Georgia that traumatizes Toomer's artist-hero, in part 1 the word “Georgia” figures prominently among the symbolic acts that link the soil and the folk through the ideologeme of metonymic nationalism. Such references to Georgia propose that the folk culture located on the Dixie Pike is a vital spiritual link in the chain connecting region with nation, and affirming the belonging of African Americans in an expanded version of “our” America.

Jean Toomer worked as a soda jerk in high school over his grandmother’s objections and found inspiration in the soda fountain. Through it, he derived a metaphorical alternative to the one-drop rule, imagining instead essences that effervesced past the skin and colors that exceeded the monochromatic division of black and white. In Toomer’s masterpiece of experimental modernism, Cane (1923), the trope of liquid sugar provides a model for formal experimentation and fluid identities. Toomer follows this trope from cane syrup to soda pop, from copper boiling pots to Chero-Cola advertisements. In the last section of Cane, Toomer imagines a white man transformed into “a purple fluid, carbon-charged,” an image that he uses to rebuke the segregated culture of the urban North.

This chapter argues that Jean Toomer’s tactics of poetic and narrative visualization of the series of black female bodies in Cane (1923) correspond to the strategic reappropriation of lynching photographs by African American political activists in the early twentieth century. Configured in line with the ontological multivalence of photography and bearing witness to the deep antinomy embedded in the photographic archive of white supremacy, Cane disassembles the ritualized scene of lynching by reframing and restaging it. Through the confluence of its ruptured, gap-ridden female figures and its ruptured, gap-ridden form, it images the contiguity between “black ash” and “white flesh”: black flesh as burned by, and for, white flesh.

This chapter demonstrates how Toomer's critique of capitalist modernity comes to the fore in part 2 of Cane. Situated mostly in the nation's capital, the stories and poems here call into question the limitations of metonymic nationalism; if the liberation of the submerged masses is to occur, it will have to be part of a worldwide “heaving upward” of the underground races of the globe. Yet the exchange relation is also shown to dominate each and every human interaction; the very spaces within which modern city dwellers work, live, and revel are confined and constrained by a universal commodification that compels critical commentary. Faced with the task of representing this contradictory modern reality is the figure of the New Negro as artist.

This chapter explores the Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer’s critical deployment of a racist stereotype that links African American subjectivity to extreme emotional expressiveness. In his 1923 experimental volume Cane, Toomer not only invites readers to question whether such affects “belong” to the subject, but employs these stereotypes to offer an embodied, affective history of American racism. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s concept of racial “animatedness,” which captures the slippage from vitality and exuberance to a powerless, puppet-like state of innervated, non-intentional agitation, the chapter argues that Toomer uses affective stereotypes to diagnose the powerlessness of his subjects and to narrate a traumatic history in which persons are confused with things.

This introductory chapter proposes that African American poet Jean Toomer's 1923 masterwork (Cane) cannot be understood apart from the upsurge of postwar antiracist political radicalism and its aftermath. Toomer does not enthuse about America as the site of cultural pluralism or future racial amalgamation; rather, it is victory in the class struggle against capitalism and imperialism that will put an end to racial division. The violent class struggles that signaled 1919 as a possible revolutionary conjuncture, coupled with the compensatory ideological paradigms adopted by various political actors and cultural producers as insurgency devolved into quietism, supply not just the context, but the formative matrix, from which Toomer's text emerged. The expectations and desires that were aroused and then quashed in the wake of the Great War and the Russian Revolution constitute a spectre haunting the world of Cane.

This chapter explores the notion of a sung poetics in relation to race, turning to Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and other poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Here, twentieth-century African-American verse forms are studied alongside the slave spirituals, folk songs, and blues that they so frequently saluted and emulated. Toomer and Hughes, however, are shown to be using black music not just in the service of racial affirmation (as is commonly assumed) but also as a means of complicating the very idea of racial categorization. At the time of their publication, both men's works relied on musical forms that could be recognized and sung by readers of various ethnic backgrounds, spirituals in the case of Toomer and blues in the case of Hughes. The musicality and performability of both men's texts, moreover, serve to promote interracial empathy and elide racial difference: for readers and writers of this literary tradition, to sing a race's music through the medium of poetry is to be made to identify with that race.

Thie part of the book includes poems which were marked by Imagism, improvisation, and experimentation. This period in Jean Toomer's work is termed the Aesthetic period. Between 1919 and 1921, Toomer experimented with several forms of poetry including haiku, lyrical impressionism, and “sound poetry.” The major influences on his artistic and philosophical development during this period were Orientalism, French and American Symbolism, and Imagism.

This part of the book includes the poetry by Toomer that derived from an espousal of Quaker religious philosophy. The poetry canon produced here constitutes a dramatization of consciousness, a veritable phenomenology of the spirit. This phase came after Toomer moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1938 where he was almost immediately attracted to Quakerism.

This concluding chapter offers a brief consideration of the relationship between history and form in Cane. Given the wide range of interpretations of the text's parts, it comes as no surprise that critics have presented dramatically differing interpretations of the whole. Some have discerned a progression toward resolution and synthesis; others a suspended state of fragmentation and division; while others a triumphant achievement of polyphony and hybridity. With a few noteworthy exceptions, however, commentaries on Cane have largely overlooked the text's engagement with history. They may address Cane's representation of the present as an outgrowth of the past, and its connection with contemporaneous racial discourses and practices, but they do not generally treat the text's form as itself an enactment of the historical contradictions shaping the time and place of its creation.