{"id":61337,"date":"2021-08-29T01:32:07","date_gmt":"2021-08-29T01:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=61337"},"modified":"2021-08-29T01:32:54","modified_gmt":"2021-08-29T01:32:54","slug":"how-jean-toomer-rejected-the-black-white-binary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=61337","title":{"rendered":"How Jean Toomer Rejected the Black-White Binary"},"content":{"rendered":"

How Jean Toomer Rejected the Black-White Binary<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Paris Review<\/a>
2019-01-14<\/p>\n

Ismail Muhammad<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

…to be a Negro is\u2014is?\u2014
to be a Negro, is. To Be.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014from \u201cToomer,\u201d by Elizabeth Alexander<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Jean Toomer<\/a> had a complex relationship to his first and only major publication, the 1923 book Cane<\/a><\/em>. The \u201cnovel,\u201d which Penguin Classics has recently reissued with an introduction by the literary scholar George Hutchinson<\/a> and a foreword by the novelist Zinzi Clemmons<\/a>, is a heterogeneous collection of short stories, prose vignettes, and poetry that became an unlikely landmark of Harlem Renaissance<\/a> literature. Its searching fragments dramatize the disappearance of African-American folk culture as black people migrated out of the agrarian Jim Crow<\/a> South and into Northern industrial cities. It is a haunting and haunted celebration of that culture as it was sacrificed to the machine of modernity. Toomer termed the book a \u201cswan song\u201d for the black folk past.<\/p>\n

The literary world was then (as it is now, perhaps) hungry for representative black voices; as Hutchinson writes, \u201cMany stressed the \u2018authenticity\u2019 of Toomer\u2019s African-Americans and the lyrical voice with which he conjured them into being.\u201d This act of conjuring lured critics into reflexively accepting the book as a representation of the black South\u2014and Toomer as the voice of that South. As his one-time friend Waldo Frank<\/a> remarked in a forward to the book\u2019s original edition, \u201cThis book is the South.\u201d Cane<\/em> transformed Toomer into a Negro literary star whose influence would filter down through African-American literary history: his interest in the folk tradition crystallized the Harlem Renaissance\u2019s search for a useable Negro past, and would be instructive for later writers from Zora Neale Hurston<\/a> to Ralph Ellison<\/a> to Elizabeth Alexander…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For Toomer, however, this close identification with black folk culture, and the Negro in general, was inimical to his own self-conception. He largely attempted to evade conventional modes of racial identification. As he pursued a career as a writer, the young artist began to articulate an idiosyncratic and highly individualistic notion of race wherein he was \u201cAmerican, neither black nor white, rejecting these divisions, accepting people as people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,1196,8,20],"tags":[11551,3136,28042,1996,28041,28040],"class_list":["post-61337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-elizabeth-alexander","tag-george-hutchinson","tag-ismail-muhammad","tag-jean-toomer","tag-paris-review","tag-the-paris-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61337","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=61337"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61340,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61337\/revisions\/61340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}