Mixed Race Studies

An Overview of the Event: Jean Toomer and Politics at the 2012 MLA

Gino Michael Pellegrini: Education, Amalgamation, Race, Class & Solidarity
2012-01-12

Gino Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

This is my general overview of the “Jean Toomer and Politics” special session roundtable at the 2012 MLA Annual Convention. First, I want to thank Professors Barbara Foley, Charles Scruggs, and Belinda Wheeler for their excellent presentations, and a special thanks to Professor George Hutchinson for starting the Q & A. I am very much looking forward to continuing this conversation!

In her presentation, Belinda Wheeler focused on the “documents” (census, marriage, and draft) that Byrd and Gates include in the second Norton Critical Edition of Cane to support their claim that Toomer was a Negro who passed as white. Wheeler discussed how the documents, when examined carefully and in aggregate, weaken their claim. The documents show (and this is a point that Barbara Foley also made) that Toomer sometimes identified as black and sometimes as white at different junctures in his life, and this assumes that it was Toomer who actually authored the documents. In countering their claim, Wheeler also drew upon interviews that she had conducted with Susan Sandberg, the daughter of Marjorie Content, Toomer’s second wife, as well as with Jill Quasha, a friend of Sandberg and Content who knew the family well and authored a book on Content’s photography. Toomer was married to Content from 1934 until his death in 1967, and Wheeler’s important bibliographic research sheds light on how Toomer, post-Cane, identified and lived. Her interviews suggest that Toomer did not waver from his basic position that he was an American, neither black nor white, and that he tried to live his life free from the influence of racial categories and standards…

Read the entire overview here.

Jean Toomer and Politics (Session 465)

Modern Language Association
127th MLA Annual Convention
2012-01-05 through 2012-01-08
Washington State Convention Center
Seattle, Washington

A Special Session
Saturday, 2012-01-07, 12:00-13:15 PST (Local Time)
Room 6A, WSCC

Presiding:

Gino Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

Speakers:

Barbara Clare Foley, Professor of English and American Studies
Rutgers University, Newark

Gino Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

Charles Scruggs, Professor of English
University of Arizona

Belinda Wheeler, Assistant Professor of English
Paine  College, Augusta, Georgia

This roundtable will focus on the 2011 edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane, edited by Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and in particular on the editors’ provocative new thesis that Toomer was a Negro who chose to pass for white. Presenters will confront, examine, and discuss Byrd and Gates’s thesis.

For more information, click here.

To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance

University Press of Mississippi
1999
202 pages
Cloth: 157806130X (9781578061303)
Paper: 1578061318 (9781578061310)

Jon Woodson, Professor of English
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Jean Toomer’s adamant stance against racism and his call for a raceless society were far more complex than the average reader of works from the Harlem Renaissance might believe. In To Make a New Race Jon Woodson explores the intense influence of Greek-born mystic G. I. Gurdjieff on the thinking of Toomer and his coterie—Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, Wallace Thurman—and, through them, the mystic’s influence on many of the notables in African American literature.

Gurdjieff, born of poor Greco-Armenian parents on the Russo-Turkish frontier, espoused the theory that man is asleep and in prison unless he strains against the major burdens of life, especially those of identification, like race. Toomer, whose novel Cane became an inspiration to many later Harlem Renaissance writers, traveled to France and labored at Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Later, the writer became one of the primary followers approved to teach Gurdjieff’s philosophy in the United States.

Woodson’s is the first study of Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance to look beyond contemporary portrayals of the mystic in order to judge his influence. Scouring correspondence, manuscripts, and published texts, Woodson finds the direct links in which Gurdjieff through Toomer played a major role in the development of “objective literature.” He discovers both coded and explicit ways in which Gurdjieff’s philosophy shaped the world views of writers well into the 1960s. Moreover Woodson reinforces the extensive contribution Toomer and other African-American writers with all their international influences made to the American cultural scene.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Jean Toomer: Beside You Will Stand a Strange Man
• 2 Wallace Thurman: Beyond Race and Color
• 3 Rudolph Fisher: Minds of Another Order
• 4 Nella Larsen: The Anatomy of “Sleep”
• 5 George Schuyler: New Races and New Worlds
• 6 Zora Neale Hurston: The Self and the Nation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

From exile to transcendence: racial mixture and the journey of revision in the works of Lydia Maria Child, Hannah Crafts, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, and Jean Toomer

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
May 2010

Suzanne M. Lynch

My study, entitled From Exiles to Transcendences focuses on five authors: Lydia Maria Child, Hannah Crafts, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, and Jean Toomer. It examines each author’s effort to represent the mixed-race character as a constant “process of becoming” (Hall, Questions of Identity 4). This study aims to convey the distinctiveness of the American mixed-race character in American literature and to provide a thorough reading of how this distinctiveness is portrayed and sustained throughout the scope of the selected texts. My dissertation identifies the mixed-race voice as experientially distinct from other American raced voices while acknowledging the mixed-race character as one who demonstrates a connectedness to a plurality of racial cultures. The following chapters span a period of approximately 100 years and illustrate a common concern among them, albeit from differing perspectives and influences, regarding how home and family function as fluid spaces of racial subjectivity. My study maintains a position that the above authors questioned the presumed irreversibility of an entrenched understanding of family ties; that they challenged and rescripted the historically defined self with a self that privileges experience and discovery over pre-given identities; and that they depicted their characters as evolving subjects who created themselves with name and identity as they moved toward their “process of becoming.”

Read the dissertation here (may require log-in).

Jean Toomer and the Politics and Poetics of National Identity

Contributions in Black Studies
A Journal of African and Afro-American Studies
Volume 7, Number 1 (1985-01-01)
Article 3
24 pages

Onita Estes-Hicks
State University of New York, Old Westbury

Jean Toomer’s place in thew world of letters rests on Cane, the author’s profound statement on the quest for African-American identity. Published in 1923, Cane was composed during a year of intense creativity which followed Toomer’s three-month stay in Sparta, Georgia in 1921, during which time he served as Acting Principal in an industrial and agricultural school. As had happened to Du Bois in rural Tennessee, in backwards, poverty-ridden, oppressive Georgia, Toomer touched base with the deep roots of Black culture under conditions which recalled the slave past. The writer celebrated that return to the foundations of Black life in Cane, charting his own adventures on southern soil, contrasting the conditions of Blacks in the North, and positing cultural/geographical tradeoffs in search of a whole, healthy Black identity. Compressed yet exhaustive, Cane would be the author’s main creative statement on African American identity. That splendid work justly merits the acclaim it received at the time of its publication and the place it now occupies in the literary canon. An experimenter in life and in letters, Cane’s author realized that Cane need not and could not be duplicated; he next focused his energies on mastering the poetics of national identity, a project which had captivated his imagination during his apprentice years. Little attention has been given to this aspect of Jean Toomer’s literary and personal life, although the author’s earliest excursions into writing centered on the challenges of national identity or what he called “the new world soul.” Additionally, Toomer intermittently wrestled with the composition of a work on national identity for over fifteen years, ultimately achieving a sterling measure of success in his magnum opus, “Blue Meridian,” published in 1936.

Even before he began composing Cane, the Washingtonian explored the poetics of national identity in a poem entitled “The First American.” This Whitmanesque fragment assayed the possibility and process of constructing an inclusive national character by merging the best racial characteristics of America’s three racial groupings-Black, Red, White. This achievement would eventuate in “The First American”-a being free of the conditions of class and color, moving American nationality from theory to fact, from ideality to actuality.

Toomer’s deep interest in the question of national identity stemmed not only from his own multi-racial heritage, but also from his early life in turn-of-the century Washington, D.C., where he was reared among a significant mulatto population, some of whom-such as the Grimkes-maintained family ties across the color line. Toomer’s grandfather, Reconstruction politician, P. B. S. Pinchback, was himself the offspring of a long and stable Black-White relationship between a wealthy southern planter, Major William Pinchback, and his emancipated slave-mistress, Eliza Benton Stewart, a woman of Indian, Caucasian, and African descent. The Pinchbacks maintained ties for over eighteen years in two different states. They had eight children, two of whom, P. B. S. Pinchback and Napoleon, were sent by the father to Gilmore Academy, a private school in Cincinnati, famed for educating the mixed children of wealthy white men and African-American women. In addition to the Pinchbacks, Jean Toomer’s racial lineage consisted of other Black-White families, a condition which prompted his concern with national identity. Caucasian in appearance, Nathan Toomer, the writer’s father, lived on both sides of the color line, while listed alternately as Black and mulatto in census data. Prior to marrying Nina Pinchback, Jean’s mother, Nathan had been married to Amanda Dickson of Augusta, Georgia. The latter was the “natural” daughter of one of the wealthiest white men in the South, David Dickson, who claimed Amanda as his child in a deathbed confession, leaving her the major portion of his considerable wealth. Following the breakup of the Nathan Toomer-Nina Pinchback marriage, Nina’s second husband was Archibald Combes, of New Jersey’s famed and historic mulatto colony, Gouldtown, which had been settled by the descendants of a seventeenth-century African named Gold or Gould and the granddaughter of the Englishman Walt Fenwick, founder of southwestern New Jersey and friend of William Penn. Either by the clerk’s perception or by their own statements, both Archibald and Nina were listed as “white” on their marriage certificate.

Toomer’s complex racial background left him sceptical of racial labels and suspicious of a social system which designated people who were palpably “white” as “black.” Like Richard Wright, who similarly could not understand why a woman of his grandmother’s “white” complexion was labeled “colored,” Toomer early in his life began seeing through the social construction of reality. Race, Toomer was convinced, was a cultural, not a biological issue. Like many light-skinned Washingtonians of his time, Jean Toomer lived on both sides of the color line, as he so chose, exploiting his own biology to subvert the caprices of color. In Washington “functional passing“-to obtain jobs, to attend educational institutions, to secure entrance to entertainment facilities-had been raised to a fine art. Jean knew many Washingtonians who passed during the day to maintain jobs and who rode “uptown to the respite of a Negro home” at the end of the day, the situation faced by Vera, the central character in the author’s short story “Withered Skin of Berries.” Mary Church Terrell, a friend of the Pinchbacks, whose daughters grew up with young Jean, reported that her daughters often utilized their white skin to purchase tickets for their “darker brothers.” Questions about race and nationality never came up at the University of Wisconsin. But before going off to college, the student had prepared himself to adopt the strategy of “functional passing,” a resource which Gunnar Myrdal noted was historically called upon by numerous light-skinned students in pre-integration America to avoid the added tensions of racial problems in university life. In New York in the twenties, Toomer, Gorham Munson recalled, gained luncheon accommodations for Charles Johnson and Alain Locke by a functional pass. Moving easily across the color line, the writer, like Lear and Cordelia, regarded himself as one of “God’s spies,” garnering data on the human condition as race distorted it. Like another famous Shakesperian character, Jean Toomer often felt “what fools these mortals be.” Seeing beyond race, he felt the nation and saw it off balance and off guard and culled his own sense of nation and national identity from hardcore experience…

Read the entire article here.

The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance

Ashgate Publishing
November 2009
232 pages
Includes 5 b&w illustrations
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-6198-6

Rachel Farebrother, Lecturer in American Studies
University of Swansea

Beginning with a subtle and persuasive analysis of the cultural context, Farebrother examines collage in modernist and Harlem Renaissance figurative art and unearths the collage sensibility attendant in Franz Boas’s anthropology. This strategy makes explicit the formal choices of Harlem Renaissance writers by examining them in light of African American vernacular culture and early twentieth-century discourses of anthropology, cultural nationalism and international modernism. At the same time, attention to the politics of form in such texts as Toomer’s Cane, Locke’s The New Negro and selected works by Hurston reveals that the production of analogies, juxtapositions, frictions and distinctions on the page has aesthetic, historical and political implications. Why did these African American writers adopt collage form during the Harlem Renaissance? What did it allow them to articulate? These are among the questions Farebrother poses as she strives for a middle ground between critics who view the Harlem Renaissance as a distinctive, and necessarily subversive, kind of modernism and those who foreground the cooperative nature of interracial creative work during the period. A key feature of her project is her exploration of neglected connections between Euro-American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, a journey she negotiates while never losing sight of the particularity of African American experience. Ambitious and wide-ranging, Rachel Farebrother’s book offers us a fresh lens through which to view this crucial moment in American culture.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Boasian Anthropology and the Harlem Renaissance
• 2. ‘[F]lung out in a jagged, uneven but progressive pattern’: ‘Culture-citizenship’ in The New Negro
• 3. ‘[A]dventuring through the pieces of a still unorganized mosaic’: Jean Toomer’s Collage Aesthetic in Cane
• 4. ‘Think[ing] in Hieroglyphics’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cross-Cultural Aesthetic
• 5. Reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Textual Synthesis in Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Moses, Man of the Mountain
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index

Read the introduction here.
Read the index here.

Meridians: Mapping Metaphors of Mixed Race Indentity

University of Florida
August 2004
238 pages

Shane Willow Trudell

A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in partial fulfullment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy

Although mixed race identity traditionally has been equated with conflict, the conflict is not necessarily lived but may be more accurately viewed as a conflict of language, a conflict of metaphors. Traditionally, metaphors of mixed race identity have reflected notions of opposition and hierarchy; at the same time, mixed race individuals have searched for Utopian spaces in which conflict and tragedy are alleviated and race is imagined as a unifying, rather than divisive, idea. This study looks at the treatment of mixed race women in twentieth century novels, beginning with Jean Toomer’s Cane (1925) and then jumping to the end of the century—to Fran Ross’s Oreo (1975), Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998), and Jenoyne Adams’s Resurrecting Mingus (2001)—to study texts written during and after the Black Power Movement. It begins with an analysis of metaphors of blackness and whiteness that developed in the nineteenth century and then questions the ways these metaphors have traditionally complicated possibilities for mixed race identity, resulting in replications of the tragic mulatto and adherence to the one-drop rule. Subsequently, the analysis moves to contemporary metaphors of mixed race identity to explore their limits and possibilities and the ways in which these metaphors are implicated by questions of gender. The texts under analysis respond to the same set of problems, including the longing for Utopian spaces of wholeness and harmony within mixed race identities and non-traditional families. Additionally, these texts contain a latent struggle over questions of history, family, and racial identity. They long to articulate Utopian visions while they are confined within the historical moments and literary formulas in which they were written, and they struggle to negotiate postmodern questions of identity, self, wholeness, and harmony—both individual and communal—while bound by literary and social conventions that resist the Utopian visions they hope to articulate. Each text attempts to envision Utopian social, political, familial and individual spaces where the “play” of identity—the possibility of negotiation and individualization—may be manifested, Utopian visions of harmony may be realized, and new metaphors may be articulated.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• PREFACE
• ABSTRACT
• CHAPTER
• 1. CARTOGRAPHIES OF RACIAL IDENTITY
  • Intimate Cartography
  • Mapping Past Paths and New Directions
  • Mapping the Contemporary Landscape
  • Mapping Metaphors
  • Mixed Metaphors
  • Playing With the Map
  • Mapping the Path Ahead
• 2. THE IVORY TOWER AND THE KETTLE BLACK: NINETEENTH CENTURY METAPHORS OF RACE
  • Race Crystallized
  • Climbing the Ivory Tower
  • Climbing into the Kettle Black
  • Continued Crystallization
• 3. LINES OF CONTACT AND COHERENCE: MERIDIANS IN THE WORK OF JEAN TOOMER
  • Points of Departure
  • Dividing Lines
  • Transcending the Divide
  • Points of Contact
• 4. TRAVELING THROUGH FRAN ROSS’S OREO, NO ORDINARY COOKIE
  • The Frontier: Where Two Come Together
  • TraveHng Beyond the Boundaries
  • “She Got Womb”
  • Travelers, Questers, and Cookies
  • Traveling in/as Twos
• 5. RE-VISIONS OF DIFFERENCE IN DANZY SENNA’S CAUCASIA
  • Disappearing: The Skin We’re In
  • Bodies at Play: Performing (and Being) Race(d)
  • Appearing in the Mirroring
  • Longing and Belonging
  • Appearing in Motion and Blurring the Lines
  • Reappearing beyond Recognition
• 6. HOME LIFE: CONFLICTED DOMESTICITY IN JENOYNE ADAMS’S RESURRECTING MINGUS
  • Home Bound
  • Divided Houses
  • Cracking the Mirror
  • Coming Home
• 7. MERIDIANS ON THE MAP OF IDENTITY
• WORKS CITED
• BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Read the entire dissertation here.

Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen

University of Iowa Press
1993
255 pages, 10 photos
Paper 0-87745-437-X, 978-0-87745-437-3

Charles R. Larson, Professor of Literature
American University

Invisible Darkness offers a striking interpretation of the tortured lives of the two major novelists of the Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer, author of Cane (1923), and Nella Larsen, author of Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Charles R. Larson examines the common belief that both writers “disappeared” after the Harlem Renaissance and died in obscurity; he dispels the misconception that they vanished into the white world and lived unproductive and unrewarding lives.

In clear, jargon-free language, Larson demonstrates the opposing views that both writers had about their work vis-à-vis the incipient black arts movement; he traces each writer’s troubled childhood and describes the unresolved questions of race that haunted Toomer and Larsen all of their lives. Larson follows Toomer through the wreckage of his personal life as well as the troubled years of his increasingly quirky spiritual quest until his death in a nursing home in 1967. Using previously unpublished letters and documents, Larson establishes for the first time the details of Larsen’s life, illustrating that virtually every published fact about her life is incorrect.

With an innovative chronology that breaks the conventions of the traditional biographical form, Larson narrates what happened to both of these writers during their supposed years of withdrawal. He demonstrates that Nella Larsen never really gave up her fight for creative and personal fulfillment and that Jean Toomer’s connection to the Harlem Renaissance—and the black world—is at best a dubious one. This strong revisionist interpretation of two major writers will have a major impact on African American literary studies.

Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity [Reader Responses]

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2011-03-06

Charles R. Larson, Professor of Literature
American University, Washington, D. C.

To the Editor:

Congratulations to Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. for concluding that Jean Toomer was a Negro who decided to pass for white—the same conclusion I made in my biography of Toomer, Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen, published in 1993. Nothing like reinventing the wheel.

———————————————————————————————
Kimberly A. Barrett, Vice President for Student Affairs
University of Montevallo, Montevallo, Alabama

To the Editor:

Despite the interesting investigative work of its authors, the recent Chronicle article on Jean Toomer was troubling to me because it served as another apparent grain of truth that sustains two deeply entrenched stereotypes. One of these is the myth of the confused mulatto who is disabled by incessant struggles with his or her racial identity. The other is the “one-drop rule“—the idea that anyone with an identifiable black person in his or her lineage is assumed black. I think it’s time we acknowledge the reality of the existence of the well-adjusted multiethnic/biracial white person. As the self-identifying African-American mother of a young man who fit that description while growing up, I’d like to share part of our story in the spirit of balance.

“Your mom is black?” was a frequent refrain and innocent nod to the notion of the one-drop rule when my son’s acquaintances met me for the first time. I must admit that I, too, did not escape the influence of this perennial rule. On those dreamy weekend mornings when my husband and I lay awake pondering who our child would look like, I smugly argued that of course our child would be black because one parent was black. My husband, on the other hand, who is white (of Irish and Danish descent) and a card-carrying member of a Native American tribe, asked with dismay, “Where am I in this equation?”…

———————————————————————————————

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

To the Editor:

In their article on Jean Toomer, the authors Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. claim that Toomer suffered from a case of “conflicted racial identity” (“Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity,” The Chronicle Review, February 11). Toomer, one of the first proponents of thinking about race in multiracial “American” terms, is now said to have been passing as white. The authors justify this assertion by presenting new evidence that Toomer identified himself differently based on location and situation.

It is true that Toomer most likely self-identified as “Negro” when he registered for the draft. It is also true that in Toomer’s era, and the eras in which his ancestors were identified, census takers were allowed to list racial designation as they perceived it. So, whether Toomer is listed as white or black on the census may say little about his own thoughts on racial identity. It may, however, say much about how he was perceived by the person taking the census and/or responding on his behalf. A similar case can be made for the marriage licenses. In the absence of a handwriting expert, eyewitness, or recorded conversation, it is not verifiable that Toomer self-identified as white or whether he was designated as white by the licensor.

Nevertheless, Byrd and Gates maintain that Toomer had to be passing—and therefore engaging in racial deception—because it is not documented that any of his “direct ancestors chose to live or self-identify as white.”

Flying in the face of decades’ worth of scholarship that builds on Toomer’s work, Byrd and Gates ignore Maria Root’s “Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage.” In it, Root states that multiracial people may identify differently over time, may identify differently than their parents or siblings, and that doing so is totally acceptable. As my colleague Ulli K. Ryder of Brown University put it, “It feels like Byrd and Gates have made a conflict where, in fact, there isn’t one.”…

Read the entire responses here.

Jean Toomer’s Conflicted Racial Identity

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2011-02-06

Rudolph P. Byrd, Goodrich C. White Professor of American Studies and African American Studies
Emory University

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
Harvard University

On August 4, 1922, about a year before he published his first book, Cane, Jean Toomer, age 27, wrote to his first love, a black teenager named Mae Wright, confessing his ambivalence about the dogged pursuit by African-Americans of Anglo-American cultural ideals: “We who have Negro blood in our veins, who are culturally and emotionally the most removed from Puritan tradition, are its most tenacious supporters.” That would be one of the last times he admitted his own Negro ancestry, either publicly or privately. Six years later, Georgia O’Keeffe—Toomer’s friend and later lover—wrote to her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, describing the way Toomer, then living in Chicago, was identifying himself: “It seems that in Chicago they do not know that he has Negro blood—he seems to claim French extraction.”

When we were working on a new Norton critical edition of Cane, a masterpiece of modernism composed of fiction, poetry, and drama, we confronted the question of Toomer’s race. Literary critics and biographers have long speculated about how he identified himself, but too often they have chosen not to conduct research into public documents about the topic. Was Toomer—a central figure in two faces of American modernism, the New Negro (or Harlem Renaissance) Movement and the Lost Generation—a Negro who, following the publication of Cane, passed for white?

Toomer is known for proclaiming a new, mixed racial identity, which he called “American.” In an era of de jure segregation, such a claim was defiantly transgressive. But he may have been far more conflicted about his identity than his noble attempt to question American received categories of “race” might suggest…

…In the course of the 25 years between his 1917 and 1942 draft registrations, it seems that Toomer was endlessly deconstructing his Negro ancestry. During his childhood and adolescence in Washington, as a member of the mulatto elite, he lived in both the white and the black worlds. At times he resided in white neighborhoods, but he was educated in all-black schools. Toomer would write that it was his experience in that special world, “midway between the white and Negro worlds,” that led him to develop his novel “racial position” as early as 1914, at the age of 20, when he defined himself as an “American, neither white nor black.”…

…Why is it so important, as we read Cane, to understand Toomer’s conflicts over his racial identity? What light does it shine on scholarship about his work, about African-American literature, and the way our society has dealt with race? The first reason is the simple, or rather complicated, fact that Toomer himself thought it was important. Important? Toomer obsessed over it, endlessly circling back upon it in the comfortable isolation of his upper-middle-class home in Bucks County, Pa...

Read the entire article here.