Jean Toomer - Cane

Originally published in 1923, Cane was written in an era not so different from ours, and Jean Toomer embodied the prevailing artistic movements of his time and contextmodernism and the Harlem Renaissanceas both a writer and an individual. His literary experiments with fragmentation and hybridity placed him firmly alongside James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. At the same time, he also found fellowship among luminaries such as Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston, who committed themselves to dynamically representing African American experiences on the page. Though not usually acknowledged in the historical record, or given his due in the mainstream canon, Toomer deserves to be considered a respected figure in both movements.

These artistic movements occurred against the backdrop of the Great Migration, a decades-long period, beginning in the late nineteenth century, when thousands of blacks fled the agrarian South for industrialized labor in the north and west. This migration occurredmuch as it is in the Middle East nowbecause blacks were escaping increased racialized terror resulting from state actions such as the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which legalized separate but equal, and the subsequent Jim Crow laws that brutally upheld segregation.

In light of this, Toomer also devoted much time and thoughtpossibly even more than his writingto how he constructed his own identity. Toomer was of black and white heritage, and appeared racially ambiguous. New research by the scholars Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. suggests that he passed for white at various points in his life. In the same essay, Byrd and Gates noted, Anticipating the curiosity, confusion, and misunderstanding that his body, speech, and appearance would engender, and no doubt seeking to escape the boundaries imposed upon persons of African descent, Toomer tells us he formed his own racial position before leaving what he would have us believe was a special race world of Washington, D.C.

Toomers racial position, as described in his journals, was an aristocracy... midway between the white and Negro worlds composed of mixed-race people. This position would later inspire him to imagine a new race for himself, an extension of his actual position in Washington, D.C.a midpoint between blacks and whites from which he could communicate with both. He called this new race American, and it was both an invention and a foreshadowing of one of the many ways in which race is reimagined today.

Between 1929 and 1967, following initial publication in 1923, Cane fell out of print. Since then, editions were published in 1969, 1975, 1988, 1993, 2011, and today. In 2010, new research on Toomer was revealed. Cane is having another moment today, and it doesnt seem coincidental. After the failure of post-racialism and the shortcomings of the first black president (increasing inequality, the worsening economic situation of African Americans) have been aired, Canes importance has again been recognized.

In the wake of Barack Obamas election, the term post-racial emerged to potentially characterize the moment Americans found themselves in. With the election of a black president, and the countrys demographics tilting toward a majority-minority, it felt like we might have shed those old, constrictive notions of race. We had broken through a barrier, shattered a glass ceiling, and certainly none of those old prejudices could survive in this brave new world. Today, post-racial feels like a quaint artifact of a more hopeful time, a time we dared to imagine ourselves beyond the countrys many deep-seated racial tensions and frequent outbursts of violence.