The Roots of Cane: Jean Toomer in The Double Dealer and Modernist Networks

Abstract

Cane, like the multitudes of mixed-race life it depicts in its blurring of genres, has frequently been misrepresented, categorized either as a hallmark work of the Harlem Renaissance despite Toomer’s uneasy relationship with that movement, or as in dialogue with a modernist avant-garde typically perceived as if outside the racialist cultural sys- tems circulating in the USA in the 1920s and 1930s — but not as occupy- ing both historical categories simultaneously, or indeed blurring those lines.¹ Thanks to his early close association with Waldo Frank and later disavowal of Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925) and Nancy Cunard’s Negro (1934), Toomer often seems to have disassociated himself from the very literary movements that give his foundational work its cultural coherence. As George Hutchinson concludes of Toomer’s reception, ‘Through his “failure” (to create a language, to be called by his own name) and his subsequent “disappearance” from the literary scene, Toomer revealed the shared contradictions in “black” and “white” American racial ideologies’ (Hutchinson 1993, p. 245). Upon its publi- cation by Boni & Live right in 1923, and through its subsequent ‘redis- coveries’ at later points in the New Negro Renaissance and Black Arts Movement in the 1960s, Cane as a solitary text tends to be positioned in one way or another, yet the book’s origins operate outside of this singular framework, as several of the poems and short fictions appeared first in a range of modernist ‘little magazines’.