Jean Toomer after Cane

I reassess Jean Toomer’s poetics after the publication of his first novel Cane (1923). Cane’s critical reception has impacted and limited our understanding of his poetry, and of his racial identification, from the late 1920s to 1940s, when Toomer sought inspiration from the Eastern mystic, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, and later from the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. Challenging the neat binary of Toomer’s lyrical and didactic strains in his later work, and spotlighting the complexity of his racial posturing, I argue that the central elements of Toomer’s poetics remained constant, particularly his attention to moral and spiritual enlightenment in order to address the pressing psychosocial and racial issues of his time.

The Sound of Red Dust: Jean Toomer, Marion Brown, and the Sonic Transactions of “Karintha”

On his 1973 album Geechee Recollections, free jazzer Marion Brown tackles one of the most musical African American narratives, “Karintha” from Jean Toomer’s Cane. The velocity of sound Toomer’s text seeks to transcribe in literary form Brown trans-scribes back into music propelled by what I term Afro-kinesis. Afro-kinesis is a form of motion — a Benjaminian eddy rather than a Derridean trace — that improvises modalities of transaction with and in new-old sonic topographies, and in the process limns an aural modernity that constantly reinvents itself. This kinetic ecology of sound goes beyond acoustic transposition and instead aspires to effect a signifying exchange between the mercurial improvisation of free jazz’s “new thing” and the scripted stasis of literary text, a transaction of meaning across cultural time and physical space.

Sex under Necropolitics: Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and Black Enfleshment

Though Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) is one of the best-known texts of the Harlem Renaissance, it has rarely been discussed with the text alongside which it was initially imagined: Waldo Frank's Holiday (1923). These works were inspired by a joint trip to Spartanburg, South Carolina and were conceptualized as a shared project, what the authors termed “Holiday + Cane.” This essay tracks their coproduction with particular attention to their parallax vision of lynching to theorize what we call, building on Achille Mbembe's work, “sex under necropolitics.” This dispensation does not take shape within a privatized notion of sexuality, but instead is “ungendered” and unindividuated in the ways that Hortense Spillers has described through the notion of the flesh. We take up her work to suggest that black bodily practices and corporeal intimacies are governed by a regime other than sexuality. In this essay, we map the contours of this regime and its effects on both sides of the color line. Our new cartography promises to reconfigure understandings of the sexuality of Toomer and Frank and of the Harlem Renaissance, and to clarify the relationship between (white) queer theory and queer-of-color critique.

Invalid Modernism

Invalid Modernism contributes to an intersectional moment in disability studies by looking at aesthetics through non-conforming bodies and minds. It also offers an intersectional understanding of modernism by studying the representation of physical and cognitive difference during a period marked by progressive reforms in health, labor, and welfare. Readings of texts by Henry James, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Oscar Wilde, F. T. Marinetti, Jean Toomer, an opera by Alexander Zemlinsky, and paintings and constructions of Dadaists and Surrealists are set against historical developments in sexology, medical discourse, and eugenics and anthropometry. Modernist works are well known for challenging formal features of narration and representation, but this challenge has often been enabled by shell-shocked veterans, tubercular heroines, blind soothsayers, invalid aesthetes, and neurasthenic women. Such figures complicate an aesthetics of autonomy by which modernism is often understood. Since its evolution in the eighteenth century modern aesthetics has been seen in terms of judgments based on detached appreciation. What begins as a private sensory response to an object or natural formation results in a disinterested judgment about the value of that response. By looking at modernist aesthetics through a disability optic, Invalid Modernism attempts to restore the missing body to aesthetic discourse through figures marked by medical discourse of the period as “invalid” subjects.

Uncanny Encounters

The emergence of affect theory has returned the body to cultural theory by stressing the phenomenological impact of bodies on other bodies. Chapter 6 opens with a reading of Baudelaire’s “Une Passante” that offers one such instance. Despite its emphasis on what Lauren Berlant calls the “messy dynamics of attachment,” affect theory has not attended to disability where the encounter with the non-traditional body incites emotions of anxiety, confusion, and in some cases solidarity. This chapter explores a structure of feeling around dynamic historical changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through works by Sigmund Freud, Frank Norris, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Toomer. Each illustrates stages in what Sara Ahmed calls “dramas of contingency” by which world historical changes are registered through quotidian moments of attention and confrontation. These stages mark a trajectory in the novel, from Realism and Naturalism to the modernism of Woolf and Toomer.

“A Purple Fluid, Carbon-Charged”

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.

Artificial Color

In the early twentieth century, US writers looked at modern food—its global geographies, its nutritional theories, and its technological innovations—and saw not merely the incursion of industry and the threat of adulteration but an imaginative possibility. Fiction of the 1920s and 1930s represented food systems and used alimentary metaphors to unsettle the bases of racial classification and white supremacy. Dietetics played a key role in so-called race science, which blamed industrial food for Nordic degeneration and looked to euthenics, the study of nutrition and environment, to fix broken modern bodies that were insufficiently white. Thus, the dreams of new bodies and new categories expressed in this literature constituted a radical response to the political and nutritional theories of this cultural moment. For Jean Toomer and George Schuyler, both frustrated by the stigma of blackness in a segregated society, food technologies represented an opportunity to invent a new race or to renovate an old one. For F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway, enmeshment in the food system revealed that whiteness could not embody the purity that was supposedly its hallmark. In the Great Depression and thereafter, Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West indicted racist social structures and used food to interrogate the boundaries of the human. In a time of segregation, nativism, and Fascism, food brought bodies together and spoke of shared pleasure and vulnerability.

Jean Toomer (1894—1967)

Jean Toomer (26 December 1894—30 March 1967) was an American writer associated with literary modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. He was born as Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C., and changed his name to Jean Toomer at the beginning of his writing career in 1920. Toomer is primarily known for his critically acclaimed book Cane (1923), an experimental collage text of narratives, dramatic pieces, and poems. He also published essays, literary reviews and criticism, poems, dramatic texts, and stories in journals and newspapers. Though opposing reductive racial categories, Toomer was in close contact with the New Negro movement, initiated by Alain Locke, while he was working on Cane. Being of multiracial descent, he could easily pass for white, and lived both as black and white at different stages of his life. After the publication of Cane, he rejected all racial classifications. In the early 1920s, Toomer turned toward the spiritual ideas of George Gurdjieff, whose school of higher consciousness and spiritual self-development he followed and taught himself until 1935. In his later life, he became interested in Quakerism. With the exception of a collection of aphorisms, Toomer did not publish any more books after Cane during his lifetime.