The Roots of Cane

"This book proposes a new way to read one of the most significant works of the New Negro Renaissance, and of the modernist period more generally, Jean Toomer's Cane (1923)--or rather, a way not to read Cane. Rather than focusing on the form of the book published by Boni and Liveright, what Toomer would later call a single textual "organism," John K. Young traces the many pieces of Cane that were dispersed across multiple modernist magazines from 1922-3. These periodicals ranged from primarily political monthlies (the NAACP organ The Crisis and the Socialist Liberator), to avant-garde arts journals (the well-known Broom and The Little Review but also the more obscure S4N and Modern Review), to regional magazines with transnational aspirations (The Double Dealer in New Orleans, The Nomad in Birmingham, Alabama, and Prairie in Milwaukee, or perhaps Chicago). The Seeds of Cane interweaves a periodical-studies approach to modernism with book history and critical race theory, resituating Toomer's uneasy place within Black modernism by asking how his original readers would have encountered his work. The different contexts in which those audiences were engaging with Toomer's portraits of racialized identity in the Jim Crow United States yields often surprising results. Young returns to the experience of Cane as a book in the conclusion, re-evaluating its collage form in relation to the similar kinds of textual and narrative structures common to modern magazines"--