{"id":57212,"date":"2019-01-04T19:44:47","date_gmt":"2019-01-04T19:44:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=57212"},"modified":"2019-01-04T19:44:47","modified_gmt":"2019-01-04T19:44:47","slug":"a-century-later-a-novel-by-an-enigma-of-the-harlem-renaissance-is-still-relevant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=57212","title":{"rendered":"A Century Later, a Novel by an Enigma of the Harlem Renaissance Is Still Relevant"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Century Later, a Novel by an Enigma of the Harlem Renaissance Is Still Relevant<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Books of The Times<\/a>
\nThe New York Times<\/a>
\n2018-12-25<\/p>\n

Parul Sehgal<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nSonny Figueroa\/The New York Times<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n

He is American literature\u2019s greatest, most enduring enigma.<\/p>\n

In 1923, Jean Toomer<\/a> \u2014 highborn but an orphan and a drifter, a young man with secrets \u2014 published the single, slender novel upon which his reputation rests. In bursts of poetry and prose, \u201cCane<\/a>\u201d tells of black life in the lethal rural South and in the loveless cities of the North. The narration has a kind of cosmic consciousness, entering the world of the characters, the whispering pine trees, the falling dusk, the soil. It is oracular, delirious and American \u2014 rich with the intensities of Melville<\/a>, the expansiveness of Whitman<\/a> and Toomer\u2019s own bedeviling preoccupation with color.<\/p>\n

Many stories meander through \u201cCane\u201d (including one autobiographical section featuring a Northern writer in the South), but at its core the book is about six Southern women, including beautiful, chaotic Karintha; Carma, who slays her jealous husband; Becky, white and an outcast, the mother of two black sons. Their lives are brief, vivid, doomed \u2014 but each \u201ca wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCane\u201d sold modestly but exerted a powerful influence over the Harlem Renaissance<\/a>; it was, according to the sociologist Charles S. Johnson<\/a>, \u201cthe most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of his generation.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…A fleeting feeling. Toomer forbade his publisher to mention his race in the marketing for \u201cCane.\u201d (\u201cMy racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine.<\/a>\u201d) Nor would he allow his work to be included in black anthologies, insisting he was part of a new, emergent race, simply called American…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cCane\u201d sold modestly but exerted a powerful influence over the Harlem Renaissance; it was, according to the sociologist Charles S. Johnson, \u201cthe most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of his generation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,20],"tags":[25700,29219,1996,2640,29218,2327],"class_list":["post-57212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-books-of-the-times","tag-cane","tag-jean-toomer","tag-new-york-times","tag-parul-sehgal","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57212"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57213,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57212\/revisions\/57213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}