Mixed Race Studies

Jean Toomer, Mulatto and Modernist: the Fused Race and Fused Form of Cane

Oklahoma State University
May 1997
76 pages

Rhonda Lea McClellan

Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS

Preface

In the fall of 1993, I enrolled in Dr. Leavell’s modern/contemporary literature course that examined familiar “novels” under a different form, the short story cycle. We discussed how familiiar texts, like Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Faulkner’s Go Down Moses, and Hemingway’s In Our Time, labeled by critics as novels, could be viewed under the definitions of a different genre. As we analyzed this genre, I thought how vulnerable art and artists are at the hands of critics who define pieces based on literary traditions. Chagrined, I thought of the pieces of literature that I could have misread.

When we finally turned the pages of Jean Toomer’s Cane and examined the pioneering strategies of this modern writer, the consequences of misleading critiques became apparent to me. Rarely do we read of the Harlem Renaissance without seeing the name Jean Toomer. Accordingly, scholars contend that Toomer contributed to the awakening of the African-American experience in the 1920s and that his Cane secured his place in the African American canon.

But after reading biographical sketches, I found that Toomer, as an orphaned mulatto, rarely felt as if he belonged to any racial category. Moving between both black and white, rich and poor, young and old, Toomer knew little about securing his social position. He defined race as a social institution, an unjust categorization of Americans, creating a prejudice and fragmented society. Toomer, therefore, refused to be placed within these confines. As a result of my reading, I believe that Toomer’s social “drifting” is his personal illustration that Americans should not feel restricted to social categories and that Americans do not lead isolated lives but actually share a common experience-alienation. In fact, as an ostracized young man, he found only one way to find peace within his world, and that peace came from writing. His alienation gave Toomer an objective perspective that lead to his social and literary philosophies.

From Dr. Leavell’s emphasis on the importance of literary form and theme, I realized that critics fail to understand Cane’s structure relative to its theme. If critics did not apprehend Toomer’s racial ideology presented in Cane, how could they interpret the significance of the text’s structure? A man who would not be confined to one race could not limit his art to conventions of one culture. In Cane, Toomer fuses the art forms of the African-American with the European.

I see Toomer, a man eventually marginalized because of his racial ambiguity, creating a text, Cane, that follows the traditions of American literary pursuits. In the tradition of Franklin, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman, Toomer attempts to create an American character and structure. Toomer’s mulatto represents modern man, and he presents these isolated characters in a modern, fragmented society. He fuses his racial ideology into Cane’s structure. Like its multi-racial characters, Cane’s structure depends on the aesthetic conventions of many races. Toomer’s literary innovations with form and theme make him a Modernist. Because of his ethnicity, however, Toomer found his text as much on the periphery as himself.

After Toomer voiced his racial views and his literary aspirations, scholars would contend that Toomer “deserted his people.” I maintain that readers misinterpret Cane’s projection of his mixed-race characters and the significance of its multi-cultural form. Critics have not fully understood Toomer or Cane. Toomer’s views blur lines that critics fail to reevaluate.

After examining Toomer and his text, I can appreciate the complexity of a man who refused categorization and a book that evades literary classification. In the first chapter, I will place Toomer in American literary traditions and provide biographical details that influenced his social views. In the second chapter, I will discuss Toomer’s racial and social ideology and its impact on Cane. In the third chapter, I will focus on the theme and structure of Cane’s prose. In the fourth chapter, my focus will shift to the merging of Cane’s poetic theme and structure. Opposing other critics who have placed Toomer in the African-American canon, I propose that Jean Toomer, who was influenced by white Modernist writers, such as Anderson and Frank, experiments with a national character-the mulatto-and a national form-a structure blending the art forms of the African American and European American-and writes within the broader traditions of American literature.

Read the entire thesis here.

Is the Tanning of America Only Skin Deep?

The Huffington Post
2012-05-17

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

It’s official: The United States is officially “tan.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s first population estimate by age, race, ethnicity, and sex since the 2010 Census, “50.4 percent of our nation’s population younger than age 1 were minorities as of July 1, 2011. This is up from 49.5 percent from the 2010 Census taken April 1, 2010. The population younger than age 5 was 49.7 percent minority in 2011, up from 49.0 percent in 2010.”

As expected, media flurry ensued. The Associated Press was among the first outlets to pick up the story reporting, “For the first time, racial and ethnic minorities make up more than half the children born in the U.S.” USA Today noted the nation’s changing complexion and described the Census Bureau’s report as “a sign of how swiftly the USA is becoming a nation of younger minorities and older whites.” And according to the New York Times, “such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive.”

Now that the moment is here we must reckon with it. Today’s Census statement marks a social milestone for a nation that has struggled with issues of diversity, privilege, and power. But, as I suggest in my forthcoming book Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity, the tanning of America might be only skin deep. Or, putting it differently: Is the U.S. passing as “tan”?…

…Here’s why you should care. Because looking at tomorrow’s “tanning” generation in demographic terms only subtly promotes them as the chosen ones who can and will dismantle racism that took centuries to build. When we take this perspective we are shifting the responsibility of solving institutional and structural racism off those of us who were born before July 1, 2011 and off our legal and social histories. This is not only unfair — it’s unrealistic. Predicting the demise of racism by the rising number of nonwhite births is probably not the best way to fulfill our desire for a more just society. Wouldn’t the present-day elimination of disparities in income, employment, health care, education, crime, punishment and family structure for this new generation (as well as their parents) be more accurate measures?…

Read the entire article here.

To “Flash White Light from Ebony”: The Problem of Modernism in Jean Toomer’s Cane

Twentieth Century Literature
Volume 46, Number 1 (Spring 2000)
pages 1-19

Catherine Gunther Kodat, Professor of English and American Studies
Hamilton College, Clinton, New York

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation–and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic–and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.

—Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” (Ecrits 4)

The idea of freedom, akin to aesthetic autonomy, was shaped by domination, which it universalized. This holds true as well for art-works. The more they freed themselves from external goals, the more completely they determined themselves as their own masters. Because, however, artworks always turn one side toward society, the domination they internalized also radiated externally.

—Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 17-18

My concern is solely with art. What am I?

—Jean Toomer to John McClure, July 22, 1922 (qtd. in Kerman 26)

The temptation to read Jean Toomer’s Cane as something of a modernist experiment in autobiography is strong, and scholars who do so fall into two camps: those who see the work as a tribute to the discovery of a true self, and those who read it as testimony to the failure of an attempt to make that discovery. Critics in the first camp take as their starting point Toomer’s own compelling story of the genesis of Cane: trapped in genteel poverty in Washington, D.C., caring for two ailing grandparents, feverishly working to train himself as a writer, he accepts a temporary job in the fall of 1921 at an industrial school for blacks in Sparta, Georgia, and there, exposed for the first time in his life to the Southern African American rural folk, discovers his creative voice. Those biographical readers of Cane who stress this flowering of Toomer’s creativity see the book as a lyrical celebration of rediscovered African American roots; content is stressed over form, as we are encouraged to read past Toomer’s style to uncover the racial, psychosocial meaning beneath. The poem in part 1, “Song of the Son,” is held to bear a truth at once personal and aesthetic: before he could become a great artist, Toomer—an olive-skinned young man who passed for white in college (Kerman 63)—first had to become black. Cane thus is cast as the mirror of Jean Toomer’s soul, reflecting to him a moment, however brief, of true racial vision and, it follows, great artistic achievement. The aesthetic importance of Cane thus lies less in its formal and stylistic experiments than in its unapologetic, nonbourgeois choice of the Southern black peasant as hero.

Events in Toomer’s life subsequent to Cane can seem to bolster this critical argument. In 1923, when Horace Liveright urged Toomer to stress his “colored blood” in the brief biography Boni & Liveright planned to use in publicizing Cane, Toomer objected: “My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine” (qtd. in Kerman 110-11). This first link in a long chain of racial disclaimers climaxed in the 1932 pamphlet “A Fact and Some Fictions,” in which Toomer wrote: “As for being a Negro, this of course I am not—neither biologically nor socially” (qtd. in Benson 43). Toomer “had considered the matter and was determined to erase, as much as possible, his connections to the Afro-American experience,” notes Nellie Y. McKay, concluding that this rejection had debilitating artistic consequences (199). The sense of wholeness and creative well-being that flowed from Toomer’s embrace of rural blackness evaporated as the author sought a “raceless,” philosophical (as opposed to a esthetic) unity of spirit. His writings became increasingly dry and didactic, and the vast bulk remained unpublished in his lifetime.

Thus, while Cane is seen as a pinnacle of achieved wholeness, a moment of aesthetic racial truth, Toomer himself is frequently portrayed as a peculiarly modern incarnation of “double consciousness“: the racially alienated man. The second group of biographical critics stresses this apparently divided nature of Toomer’s psyche and, far from seeing Cane as a unified, lyrical expression of race spirit, argues for a view of the work’s generic indeterminacy and fragmented formal properties as aesthetic embodiments of Toomer’s riven self. Alan Golding, for example, argues that “Toomer’s drive to make the pieces of Cane balance or cohere enacts on the formal level his struggle to reconcile both the contradictory spirits of North and South and the black and white within himself” (198). In a formulation that harkens back to W. E. B. DuBois’s articulation, in The Souls of Black Folk, of “double consciousness,” Golding writes: “Cane shows Toomer in 1923 intellectually an American and emotionally a black” (200).  In this view, the mirror of Cane is no longer whole but splintered, reflecting a fragmented vision of the self that interrogates–rather than celebrates–categories of racial identity and difference and the aesthetic practices that serve to elaborate those categories. In this emphasis of form over content, Cane is usually no longer seen as primarily a black text but a modern text, in the traditional, “universal” sense of the term. This universalizing approach has had some predictable effects: in two thoughtful essays, Rudolph P. Byrd has wondered whether Cane should be read as part of the African American literary tradition at all…

Read the entire article here.

‘Brother Mine’ highlights unique relationships

The Oakland Post: Oakland University’s Independent Newspaper
Rochester, Michigan
2011-02-08

Ryan Hegedus

Reading other peoples’ mail can land you in serious trouble with the government.
 
Or, in the case of Dr. Kathleen Pfeiffer, it can land you a book deal.
 
Pfeiffer, an associate professor of English at Oakland University, is the author of “Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, a back-and-forth account of over 120 letters between the two in the 1920s.”
 
Toomer, a young black author, began writing to Frank, an established white writer in New York, and the book details the unique friendship between the two.
 
“Dr. Pfeiffer’s work provides an important tool for understanding the dynamics of the relationship between Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank,” said associate history professor and chair of the history department, Karen Miller. “Both Toomer and Frank were participants in the conflict over the construction of racial identity. Their correspondence helps us to understand how the debates over race worked themselves into friendships.”
 
In the summer of 1993, Pfeiffer was deciding on the topic of her dissertation at Yale University, and ended up at the university’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, one of the country’s best resources for African-American literature. The opportunity gave her the chance to do research in the primary archives.
 
It was at Beinecke that she decided on the topic of race passing.
 
Race passing was a “hot topic” in American literature at the turn of the century, Pfeiffer explained, where people who were legally defined as black because of previous generations, were actually light enough to pass for a white person.
 
“These people would take on a new identity and pass for white,” Pfeiffer said. “They would have this better opportunity as a white person than they would have as a black person, but then there would be all of this guilt and sense of loss because they’d have to leave their families. That’s really what my dissertation was about — about stories of characters who ‘pass.’”…

Read the entire article here.

Brother Mine:  The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank

University of Illinois Press
2010
208 pages
6 x 9 in.
14 black & white photographs

Edited by:

Kathleen Pfeiffer, Associate Professor of English
Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

An extraordinary literary friendship, preserved in letters

The friendship of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank was one of the most emotionally intense, racially complicated, and aesthetically significant relationships in the history of American literary modernism. Waldo Frank was an established white writer who advised and assisted the younger African American Jean Toomer as he pursued a literary career. They met in 1920, began corresponding regularly in 1922, and were estranged by the end of 1923, the same year that Toomer published his ambitiously modernist debut novel, Cane.

While individual letters between Frank and Toomer have been published separately on occasion, they have always been presented out of context. This volume presents for the first time their entire correspondence in chronological order, comprising 121 letters ranging from 200 to 800 words each. Kathleen Pfeiffer annotates and introduces the letters, framing the correspondence and explaining the literary and historical allusions in the letters themselves.

Reading like an epistolary novel, Brother Mine captures the sheer emotional force of the story that unfolds in these letters: two men discover an extraordinary friendship, and their intellectual and emotional intimacy takes shape before our eyes. This unprecedented collection preserves the raw honesty of their exchanges, together with the developing drama of their ambition, their disappointments, their assessment of their world, and ultimately, the betrayal that ended the friendship.

When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature

University of Illinois Press
2003
328 pages
6 x 9 in.
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-02819-9

Edited by:

Jonathan Brennan, Professor of English
Mission College, Santa Clara, California

An exploration of the literature, history, and culture of people of mixed African-Native American descent

An exploration of the literature, history, and culture of people of mixed African American and Native American descent, When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote is the first book to theorize an African-Native American literary tradition. In examining this overlooked tradition, the book prompts a reconsideration of interracial relations in American history and literature.

Jonathan Brennan, in a sweeping historical and analytical introduction to this collection of essays, surveys several centuries of literature in the context of the historical and cultural exchange and development of distinct African-Native American traditions. Positing a new African-Native American literary theory, he illuminates the roles subjectivity, situational identities, and strategic discourse play in defining African-Native American literatures.

Brennan provides a thorough background to the literary tradition and a valuable overview to topics discussed in the essays. He examines African-Native American political and historical texts, travel narratives, and the Mardi Gras Indian tradition, suggesting that this evolving oral tradition parallels the development of numerous Black Indian literary traditions in the United States and Latin America.

The diverse essays cover a range of literatures from African-Native American mythology among the Seminoles and mixed folktales among the Cherokee to autobiography, fiction, poetry, and captivity narratives. Contributors discuss, among other topics, the Brer Rabbit tales, shifting identities in African-Native American communities, the “creolization” of African American and Native American mythologies and religions, and Mardi Gras Indian performance. Also considered are Alice Walker’s development of an African-Native American identity in her fiction and essays and African-Native American subjectivity in the works of Toni Morrison and Sherman Alexie.

“Cane”, Race, and “Neither/Norism”

The Southern Literary Journal
Volume 32, Number 2 (Spring, 2000)
pages 90-101

Charles Harmon

“My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine.”

—Jean Toomer to Horace Liveright

Of all people, Jean Toomer wrote Cane. For a long time, this fact has made critics a little uneasy, a little wistful. The elusiveness of the text itself is the source of some of this wistfulness, and this feeling is only compounded by the elusiveness of Toomer the man. Still, critics have devised serviceable methods to control the ambiguity of both text and author. The currently routine way to read Cane controls the ambiguity of the text itself by interpreting it in a manner similar to the routine way to read that once-mysterious landmark, The Waste Land. Faced with an intriguing array of textual shards, Toomer’s critics patiently triangulate behind the words of Cane until they reach what Nellie Y. McKay has called Toomer’s “song of celebration to the elements that constitute Afro-American experience” (33). In the same way that The Waste Land arranges fragments of desiccated gloom in order to adumbrate a between-the-lines intuition of vernal hope, Cane, according to many critics, arranges fragmentary representations of racial confusion in order to communicate a between-the-lines intuition of racial coherence. In the words of Houston Baker, “As the reader struggles to fit the details together” he or she takes “a journey toward liberating black American art” (80).

The other elusiveness I have mentioned—that of Toomer himself—is not disposed of so easily. As is well known, Toomer took offense at marketing Cane as a work of African American literature. Although he did not always deny the possibility of having African American ancestry, he disliked having any racial designation whatsoever (besides “American”) placed upon him. His biographers have made clear that partly in response to having race be an aspect of his literary persona, Toomer stopped writing the kinds of books that appealed to the audience that admired Cane. Instead of writing other modernist texts, after Cane Toomer mostly wrote linear (and in his life unpublished) books–books that tend to dwell with numbing clarity upon the serenity he found in various philosophical systems. Many of these writings have now been dufffully read and analyzed by scholars of Cane. Still, it remains fair to say that critics have admired the Toomer of Cane because they believe that during the relatively brief time he worked on that particular text, Toomer found a way to strike a balance between racial solidarity and literary ambiguity. No matter how difficult his writing may have been, critics believe that in his heart Toomer disciplined his speculative nature by ultimately identifying himself with African American culture. By contrast, critics have disliked, pitied, or condescended to the Toomer that came after Cane because they believe that during that period of his life, Toomer shifted the quality of ambiguity from his writing to his race. His books became (if anything) too easy to understand, while his sense of racial solidarity became harder and harder to divine.

Thus, we have been left with a “good” Toomer and a “bad” Toomer. The good Toomer briefly and tactfully uses race to contain literary ambiguity, but the bad Toomer jettisons both race and literary ambiguity in favor of such systems as Quakerism and the teachings of Gurdjieff. Whatever one may think of this view of Toomer’s career, there is little doubt that—simply by ensuring Cane’s solid canonization—it has had a beneficial effect upon the study of twentieth-century literature. With Cane’s interest and importance thus solidified, however, other critics have gone on to challenge the orthodox reading of Toomer that has resulted in Cane’s current status. These critics have argued that Toomer’s ambivalence toward racial identity is much more evident in Cane than such critics as McKay and Baker have recognized. Donald B. Gibson, for instance, has insisted that far from being a monument of black American literature, Cane is the “response of one for whom black life.., was too much to bear” (179). In a more moderate vein, George Hutchinson has also claimed that Cane ultimately distances itself from the traditions and resources of African American culture. The text does this, Hutchinson argues, less out of Toomer’s fear of blackness and more out of his desire to represent “a new kind of ethnic subject, the possibility of whose existence was disallowed by both…

Penn mutliheritage organization experiences re-birth

The Daily Pennsylvanian
2012-04-06

Diana Gonimah

Mixed ethnicity students met to discuss their experiences and Check One’s future

Last night, Penn students came together over their ability to check more than one box under “Ethnicity” on their college applications.

College junior Chris Cruz and Engineering sophomore Ibrahim Ayub hosted a general body meeting to relaunch Check One, a multiracial and multicultural organization that has not met for about a decade on Penn’s campus after being founded in 1995.

Cruz, who served as chair of the United Minorities Council on its previous board, said the purpose of relaunching Check One was to meet a “pressing demand for a space to be created for the multicultural and multiracial community as a great number of Americans identify as multiracial.”

The meeting — which was dubbed “So …What are You?” — attracted a diverse group of Penn students who identified themselves as belonging to more than one ethnicity or culture…

Read the entire article here.

Out writer Andrew Jolivétte on Obama and race

Windy City Times
Chicago, Illinois
2012-02-21

David-Elijah Nahmod

History was made a few short years ago, when Barack Obama became the first African American president in U.S. history. Though it’s been mentioned, the fact that the president is actually half white hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention.

There’s no question that American demographics are changing rapidly. The Leave It To Beaver/Father Knows Best nuclear family is disappearing, and is being replaced by families that encompass all the colors of the rainbow.

In his new book, Obama and the Biracial Factor (The Policy Press), professor Andrew J. Jolivétte of San Francisco State University offers a series of essays in which a variety of writers discuss the changing colors of the American landscape. The writers are all university academics, representing a variety of schools and ethnicities. Jolivette talked with Windy City Times about why he felt the book was needed, as well as his own status as a multicultural gay man.

Windy City Times: Can you tell us about the classes you teach at San Francisco State University?

Andrew J. Jolivette: I started teaching almost 12 years ago at the University of San Francisco. It was a people of mixed-descent class that focused on people who are multiracial. I was born and raised in San Francisco and moved to Oakland about eight years ago. For the past two years I’ve been chair of the American Indian Studies Department at San Francisco State University.

I’ve taught a lot of different classes over the years: Mixed Race Studies, People of Color and AIDS, American Indian Education, American Indian Religion and Philosophy, and Black Indians in the Americas. I suppose because of my training in sociology I am interested in many different social and behavior explanations for societal inequalities, especially for Native Americans, LGBT and communities of color…

…WCT: Why do you think there’s a need for this book?

Andrew J. Jolivette: My own background as a Louisiana Creole (French, American Indian–Opelousa and Atakpa, African and Spanish ) has always hadan impact on my identity. Growing up I wasn’t sure where I fit in exactly in terms of race. My father is a Creole from the Southwest and my mother is African American and American Indian from Alabama and Indianapolis. People always tried to guess what my background was and I’ve heard just about everything from Egyptian and Cuban to East Indian. People from mixed backgrounds are often forced to move between different identities. In the case of Mr. Obama, I argue he knows how to navigate through many different communities. He can relate to white Americans, Black Americans and many other groups because he’s lived in so many different cultures. He has found a way to relate to people that helped him get elected…

…WCT: When he was first elected, much was made of Obama being the first Black president. Do you have any insight as to why his biracial status hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention?

Andrew J. Jolivette: Most of the country still argues that if you have any African or Black ancestry you will be seen and treated as Black. This is true only to a certain extent. In the book, I argue that being half white, being biracial, also shapes who he is as a person…

Read the entire article here.

Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice

Stanford University Press
April 2012
280 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780804774079
Paper ISBN: 9780804774086
E-book: ISBN: 9780804782050

Catherine Bliss, Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of California, San Francisco

Winner of the 2014 Oliver Cromwell Cox Award, sponsored by the ASA Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities.

In 2000, with the success of the Human Genome Project, scientists declared the death of race in biology and medicine. But within five years, many of these same scientists had reversed course and embarked upon a new hunt for the biological meaning of race. Drawing on personal interviews and life stories, Race Decoded takes us into the world of elite genome scientists—including Francis Collins, director of the NIH; Craig Venter, the first person to create a synthetic genome; and Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence, among others—to show how and why they are formulating new ways of thinking about race.

In this original exploration, Catherine Bliss reveals a paradigm shift, both at the level of science and society, from colorblindness to racial consciousness. Scientists have been fighting older understandings of race in biology while simultaneously promoting a new grand-scale program of minority inclusion. In selecting research topics or considering research design, scientists routinely draw upon personal experience of race to push the public to think about race as a biosocial entity, and even those of the most privileged racial and social backgrounds incorporate identity politics in the scientific process. Though individual scientists may view their positions differently—whether as a black civil rights activist or a white bench scientist—all stakeholders in the scientific debates are drawing on memories of racial discrimination to fashion a science-based activism to fight for social justice.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The New Science of Race
• 2. Making Science Racial
• 3. The Sociogenomic Paradigm
• 4. Making Sense of Race with Values
• 5. Everyday Race-Positive
• 6. Activism and Expertise
• 7. The Enduring Trouble with Race
• Notes
• Index