Tag: Jean Toomer

  • Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity [Reader Responses] The Chronicle of Higher Education 2011-03-06 Charles R. Larson, Professor of Literature American University, Washington, D. C. To the Editor: Congratulations to Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. for concluding that Jean Toomer was a Negro who decided to pass for white—the same conclusion I made…

  • Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity The Chronicle of Higher Education 2011-02-06 Rudolph P. Byrd, Goodrich C. White Professor of American Studies and African American Studies Emory University Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research Harvard University On August 4, 1922,…

  • Race Passing and American Individualism University of Massachusetts Press February 2003 176 pages Cloth ISBN: 1-55849-377-8 (Print on Demand) Kathleen Pfeiffer, Professor of English Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan A literary study of the ambiguities of racial identity in American culture In the literature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, black characters who pass for…

  • A New Look At The Life Of Jean Toomer National Public Radio All Things Considered 2010-12-30 Robert Siegel, Host Rudolph P. Byrd, Goodrich C. White Professor of American Studies and African American Studies Emory University Jean Toomer received much acclaim for his portrait of African-American life in the early 20th century in his 1923 book…

  • Scholars Say Chronicler of Black Life Passed for White New York Times 2010-12-26 Felicia R. Lee Renown came to Jean Toomer with his 1923 book “Cane,” which mingled fiction, drama and poetry in a formally audacious effort to portray the complexity of black lives. But the racially mixed Toomer’s confounding efforts to defy being stuck…

  • American Mixed-Race Literature: Cultural History, Precursors, Identities, and Forms of Expression Purdue University 2004 116 pages Publication Number: AAT 3166693 ISBN: 9780542022999 Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjust Assistant Professor of English Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California This dissertation focuses on recent instances of mixed race literature in American culture such as Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia, Rebecca…

  • “A Little Yellow Bastard Boy”: Paternal Rejection, Filial Insistence, and the Triumph of African American Cultural Aesthetics in Langston Hughes’s “Mulatto” Robert Paul Lamb, Professor of English Purdue University College Literature Volume, 35, Number 2 (Spring 2008) pages 126-153 DOI: 10.1353/lit.2008.0012 When Langston Hughes published “Mulatto” in his second poetry collection, Fine Clothes to the…

  • A white knight meets his half-black half-brother in battle. A black hero marries a white woman. A slave mother kills her child by a rapist-master. A white-looking person of partly African ancestry passes for white. A master and a slave change places for a single night. An interracial marriage turns sour. The birth of a…

  • Building the “Blue” Race: Miscegenation, Mysticism, and the Language of Cognitive Evolution in Jean Toomer’s “The Blue Meridian” Texas Studies in Literature and Language Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2004 pages 149-180 E-ISSN: 1534-7303 Print ISSN: 0040-4691 DOI: 10.1353/tsl.2004.0008 Stephanie L. Hawkins, Assistant Professor of English University of North Texas Toomer’s vision of psychological evolution…

  • Blood-Lines That Waver South: Hybridity, the “South,” and American Bodies Southern Quarterly Volume 41, Number 1 (Fall 2003) pages 39-52 Tace Hedrick, Associate Professor of English University of Florida In the paper I investigate a certain kind of imaginative response, especially on the part of mixed-race artists, to the prevalence of racialized discourses of modernity…