The race question and the "question of the home": Revisiting the lynching plot in Jean Toomer's Cane

American Literature

Volumn 75, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 141-168

  Edmunds, Susan ^a  

^a SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65849419369     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: 15272117     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-75-1-141     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. Jean Toomer, Natalie Mann, in The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer, ed. Darwin T. Turner (Washington, D.C.: Howard Univ. Press, 1980), 296. Further references to Natalie Mann are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as NM
2. For representative readings of Natalie Mann, see Nellie Y. McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894-1936 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984), 68-78
3. and Frederik L. Rusch, "Jean Toomer's Early Identification: The Two Black Plays," MELUS 13 (spring-summer 1986): 115-24
4. For arguments that question or reassert Toomer's self-positioning as a member of the African American community in the period when he was writing Cane, see George Hutchinson, "Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35 (summer 1993): 226-50
5. Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr,Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 105
6. Ronald M. Johnson, "Those Who Stayed: Washington Black Writers of the 1920's," Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 50 (1980): 484-99
7. and Barbara Foley, "Jean Toomer's Washington and the Politics of Class: From 'Blue Veins' to Seventh-Street Rebels," Modern Fiction Studies 42 (summer 1996): 289-321
8. For further analysis of Toomer's direct engagement with African Americans' contemporary social and political struggles in Cane, see Barbara Foley, "Jean Toomer's Sparta," American Literature 67 (December 1995): 747-75
9. and '"In the Land of Cotton': Economics and Violence in Jean Toomer's Cane," African American Review 32 (summer 1998): 181-98
10. Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909-1950 (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1980), 18, 35
11. For biographical data on the making of Cane, see Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1987), 81-108
12. For details of the NAACP campaign against lynching, see Zangrando, NAACP Crusade, 41-71, 73, 77-79
13. For facts and figures concerning the rise of the black press, see Theodore G. Vincent, Voices of a Black Nation: Political Journalism in the Harlem Renaissance (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1973), 19-31
14. For a list of early black newspapers known for their stands against lynching, see Zangrando, NAACP Crusade, 13
15. On the politics of black respectability, see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993)
16. and Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996)
17. On the North American conflation of blackness and the grotesque, see Leonard Cassuto, The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 1-29
18. For the history of Toomer's ties with the Village and the intellectual circle of "Young America," see McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist, 27-31, 47
19. Kerman and Eldridge, Lives of Jean Toomer, 70, 92-93,105
20. For a discussion of modern literature's reliance on a grotesque aesthetic, see Allon White, "Pigs and Pierrots: The Politics of Transgression in Modern Fiction," Raritan 2 (fall 1982): 51-70
21. For discussions of Grimké's and Johnson's anti-lynching literature, see Gloria T. Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987), 117-32, 171-72
22. and Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 209-30
23. Angelina Weld Grimké, "Goldie," in Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké, ed. Carolivia Herron (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), 301-2
24. On this point, see Darwin T. Turner, "An Intersection of Paths: Correspondence between Jean Toomer and Sherwood Anderson," in Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation, ed. Therman B. O'Daniel (Washington, DC: Howard Univ. Press, 1988), 99-109
25. See Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984), 2
26. Vera M. Kutzinski, "Unseasonal Flowers: Nature and History in Placido and Jean Toomer," Yale Journal of Criticism 3.2 (1990): 170
27. See Foley, "Jean Toomer's Washington," 301-2
28. Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 129-31
29. and Tate, Domestic Allegories, 217-30