Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance by Michel Feith

Christine MacLeod

doi:10.1353/yes.2004.0095

Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance by Michel Feith

The Yearbook of English Studies ◽

10.1353/yes.2004.0095 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 34 (1) ◽

pp. 342-343

Author(s):

Christine MacLeod

Keyword(s):

Harlem Renaissance ◽

Jean Toomer ◽

The Harlem Renaissance

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Sex under Necropolitics: Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and Black Enfleshment

Journal of American Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021875819000847 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 54 (5) ◽

pp. 926-950

Author(s):

BENJAMIN KAHAN ◽

MADOKA KISHI

Keyword(s):

South Carolina ◽

Queer Theory ◽

Harlem Renaissance ◽

Jean Toomer ◽

Color Line ◽

Queer Of Color Critique ◽

Queer Of Color ◽

The Relationship ◽

The Harlem Renaissance

Though Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) is one of the best-known texts of the Harlem Renaissance, it has rarely been discussed with the text alongside which it was initially imagined: Waldo Frank's Holiday (1923). These works were inspired by a joint trip to Spartanburg, South Carolina and were conceptualized as a shared project, what the authors termed “Holiday + Cane.” This essay tracks their coproduction with particular attention to their parallax vision of lynching to theorize what we call, building on Achille Mbembe's work, “sex under necropolitics.” This dispensation does not take shape within a privatized notion of sexuality, but instead is “ungendered” and unindividuated in the ways that Hortense Spillers has described through the notion of the flesh. We take up her work to suggest that black bodily practices and corporeal intimacies are governed by a regime other than sexuality. In this essay, we map the contours of this regime and its effects on both sides of the color line. Our new cartography promises to reconfigure understandings of the sexuality of Toomer and Frank and of the Harlem Renaissance, and to clarify the relationship between (white) queer theory and queer-of-color critique.

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Animating Cane: Race, Affect, History and Jean Toomer

Modernism and Affect ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9780748693252.003.0008 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Julie Taylor

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Harlem Renaissance ◽

Emotional Expressiveness ◽

Jean Toomer ◽

Traumatic History ◽

History Of ◽

The Subject ◽

American Racism ◽

The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter explores the Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer’s critical deployment of a racist stereotype that links African American subjectivity to extreme emotional expressiveness. In his 1923 experimental volume Cane, Toomer not only invites readers to question whether such affects “belong” to the subject, but employs these stereotypes to offer an embodied, affective history of American racism. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s concept of racial “animatedness,” which captures the slippage from vitality and exuberance to a powerless, puppet-like state of innervated, non-intentional agitation, the chapter argues that Toomer uses affective stereotypes to diagnose the powerlessness of his subjects and to narrate a traumatic history in which persons are confused with things.

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