“Reading” Race: A Paratextual Investigation of Racial Representation in Jean Toomer’s Cane

Andy C. Ng 12/16/14

ENGL-UA 963-001 Professor S. Posmentier

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ABSTRACT Scholars have long considered Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) as a classic text that takes the “historical

experiences and social conditions of the Negro” and transform them into a “metaphor for the human

condition” and “modernity itself” (Byrd and Gates, lxiii). But given Toomer’s own history of passing and

candidness about not making much about race, to what extent does race truly play a role in his “novel”?

This project seeks to identify how Toomer’s ideas of racial identity are represented in and out of his text,

and whether these representations reflect his documented resistance to racial categorization. Both the

contents of Cane and its published covers from the 1969 and 2011 editions will be used to explore how

textual and visual elements are used to construct and convey an author’s ideas. Integral to this research is

not only Toomer’s biography, but also the historical moments in which his text was originally published

and reproduced. In applying a paratextual lens to “read” Toomer’s text, it is found that while race is a

critical feature of Cane, its commentary bearing significance throughout history and still today, it remains

a constraining and compulsory subject that Toomer wishes for himself and his American audience to

move beyond.

1.

Jean Toomer is often cited as the most paramount and revolutionary author to come out of the

Harlem Renaissance. His most famous text, Cane, is the product of a transformative trip to Sparta,

Georgia in 1921; and as countless scholars have asserted in the past, Cane is an obvious work that

engages a complex assortment of subjects including the American South, blackness and tradition. While

the 1923 publication had disappointing sales, Toomer’s literary debut won him unanimous praise from

writers and artists in his social and literary circles in Greenwich Village and Washington, D.C. William

Stanley Braithwaite, writing in The New Negro, claimed: “Cane is a book of gold and bronze, of dusk and

flame, of ecstasy and pain, and Jean Toomer is a bright morning star of a new day of the race in

literature” (Byrd and Gates, lvii).

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To call Cane a book or novel, however, is to fall short of ascribing credit to a rare, creative

phenomenon. In absence of a central linear plot, the text is a scrapbook of moving vignettes, short prose

and poems, each part transitioning from “simple forms to complex ones…from the South up into the

North, and back into the South” (Byrd and Gates, lv). As Farebrother observes, it is Toomer’s classic

work of “bold manipulation of a collage technique; he abandons progressive plotting, instead assembling

a variety of disparate forms and genres” (Farebrother, p. 503). Cane’s form and complexity necessitates

moving back and forth between pieces, drawing new dots together to assemble a sense of meaning. It is

in this regard that the text warrants respect and study today.

Source: Poetry Foundation

Still, it was not just Toomer’s artistry that lauded attention, but his focused outlook on Negro

life in the United States. A hallmark of African American literature, Cane interrogates racial relationships,

spirituality and violence. Moreover, it was Toomer’s own racial identity and biography that characterized

and perhaps enabled the significance of this work. The intimate relationship and ideology shared

between Toomer and his art has led some to see Cane as an attempt to “fit the blackness that was a part

of him into a more comprehensive human view” (Byrd and Gates, lxii). The “gifted Negro” (Byrd and

Gates, lix) behind a text so quintessentially immersed in a racial consciousness, was in reality, uniquely

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conflicted with the function and consequences of his own racial identification. Authorial investigations

of Toomer raise questions about Cane’s purpose and its implications for a wider audience.

To better understand Toomer’s motivations for Cane and the text’s function throughout history,

an analysis must go beyond the biographical and historical, and converse with the work in its totality.

Texts, as Jay Garcia has noted, “constitute significant historical artifacts in and of themselves” (Garcia, p.

24). While there has been scholarly emphasis on Toomer’s personal history and literary analysis of Cane’s

rhetorical forms, little attention has been paid to the visual and informed power of Cane’s paratextual

elements, particularly its covers. For as Toomer’s text was a response to his experiences in Sparta, so too

do the book covers offer an interpretation of not just the text, but the historical moments in which they

are published. Different interests and perspectives meet via the cover, and within this space, readers first

begin to “read” the text. By disobeying the childhood lesson of never judging a book by its cover,

readers and scholars alike can engage in a necessary “visual involvement and interpretation” (Kratz, p.

180).

Source: Yale University Library

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The original cover of Cane clearly articulates the importance of landscape in the writing that

follows. Though no figures are shown, the land is still racialized with the essence of labour exploitation

from the plantation; the palm trees signaling the migratory history of Africans through the West Indies

into America. The rural landscape is painted with somber black and purple tones, and the productive

quality of the South is absent – the faded green land here is desolate and foreboding.

Cane has been assigned to the literary canon, but why does it continue to hold significance

almost a century after its publication? Just like any text, its value is subject to time and context, and in

evaluating editions from 1969 and 2011 this project hopes to understand the relevancy of Toomer’s ideas

concerning race and how its significance has shifted over time.

The value of paratext lies in the truth that all readings are also “mis-readings, re-readings, partial

readings, imposed readings, and imagined readings of a text that is originally and finally never simply

there” (Kratz, p. 183). The physical presentation of a piece of literature gives us further clues about how

we are intended to read it and gives us further clues about the means of its production and the social role

it plays. So if Toomer doesn’t make much of race, is that belief reflected in the covers of its various

editions? Evaluating these might help us answer that question. Moreover, what does Cane mean in our

contemporary time? In the wake of new racial tensions within the scope of police brutality, Toomer’s

belief in the limits of race might hold very true. Still, his optimism for a post-racial society has yet to

arrive and it seems like it never will.

2. 1969 Edition

The cover of the 1969 edition of Cane invokes the “ethos of the Negro in the Southern setting,”

(x) as Arna Bontemps writes in the adjoining intro. Noted as “by far the most impressive product of the

Negro Renaissance,” Toomer’s text inevitably has race written all over it. The silhouette of an unknown

figure frames a scene of agriculture and cultivation. Three figures appear to be plowing and digging at

the land; dark-skinned, one could reason these are Southern slaves on a plantation. But what else about

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this cover exhibits this particular geography and race? Perhaps the scene signals and triggers the

particular history resting in the American consciousness since slavery – that agriculture in the south lives

in the black body.

Source: uspacegallery

Toomer explicates upon this relationship in “Blood Burning Moon,” where Bob Stone and Tom

Burwell’s battle over Louisa ends in a “ghost of a yell slipped through the flames and out the great door

of the factory” (p. 48-49). More than just a sexual discourse, Toomer constructs the tension between

Bob and Tom as visibly racial; as Louisa observes: “His black balanced, and pulled against, the white of

Stone, when she thought of them” (p. 39). The description seems to encourage readers to consider race

as a substantive concept that differentiates Bob and Tom, and roots part of their conflict, yet Toomer

undercuts the use of racial categorization as Bob passes Louisa’s house. The narrator considers, “She was

lovely—in her way. Nigger way. What way was that? Damned if he knew...Looking at them didnt tell you

anything. Talking to them didnt tell you anything” (p. 44). Bob Stone’s attempted explanation for his

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admiration of Louisa as a consequence of race fails. The observation here then is that racial

categorization and interpretation is futile.

Farebrother has also noted that this story is “saturated with ‘evocative imagery of the sugarcane

economy’” (Farebrother, p. 511). Tom and Bob’s dispute is enveloped in the cane, the leaves cutting

their faces and lips and the “cane-roots [taking] the fever from [Bob’s] hands” (p. 46). Such imagery not

only “underlines the inescapable history of enslaved labour in the South” (Farebrother, p. 511), but it

also resurrects the master-slave dialectic that still plagues the economic structure of the post-

Reconstruction American South. Is it then that race, often spoken of as a social construct, is not only

formed and negotiated through relations, but is also a visual interrogation? Examining the 1969 cover, it

is the juxtaposition of the field workers and land within the silhouette rather than “explicit declaration”

that implies textual meaning” (Farebrother, p. 507).

The legacy and tragedy of the Southern plantation fills the figure’s face on the cover, as if

mimicking Toomer’s own experience of grounding part of his identity in the Southern history of his

family and Negro race. As he wrote to Claude McKay, “[the] visit to Georgia last fall was the starting

point of almost everything of worth that I have done” (ix). Hearing folk songs “from the lips of Negro

peasants,” Toomer admits that a “deep part of my nature, a part that I had repressed, sprang suddenly to

life and responded to them” (ix). Consumed with the Negro’s rural experience, the figure’s open lips part

as if to share these new stories and in doing so, “invariably tell [itself] something” (viii). Cane then is an

important text for not only traversing the American Negro’s cultural landscape, but it’s also a work of

evolving black identity. Displayed in the aesthetic form of the 1969 cover, the text draws the silhouette in

an act of meeting one’s history.

Yet despite its cultural meditations, Cane did not “catch aflame” like the forest in “Nullo” (2011,

p. 27) until the Civil Rights Movement and equally important African American Studies movement of

the 1960s. Post-segregation, in the judicial sense, an improved racial climate allowed more thorough

conversations about race. During this transformative time in American and black social structures, the

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rural landscape of the South evolved into a site where “rural and small-town life [was] dying, where

people [had] pulled up roots and moved to the city” (Goldfield, p. 182). Given the rich culture of the

South, where “black identity and the land were intimately connected”…communities that were partly

built around work (Goldfield, p. 183), the disintegration of farm life signaled a vanishing of Black

identities.

The 1969 cover bears witness to this history. Emphasizing the “black peasantry in the first

section [of Cane]” (xii), the cover presents a space of reflection upon African American cultural roots in

the rural as they began moving into urban areas. In the voice of “Song of the Son” the cover is a last-

minute lamentation: “Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet / To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon

gone” (13-14) (2011, p. 17). The use of silhouette might then be a metaphor of the significance history

plays in how an individual’s identity is shaped. For Toomer, his infamous visit to Georgia weighed heavy

on his racial identity: “The mould is cast, and I cannot turn back even if I would” (ix).

Source: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco

As much as the Cane thrusts race as a feature, Toomer personally ached to move beyond the use

and value of it. In arriving to a more concrete understanding of his Negro existence, he was reminded

how “America viewed life as if it were divided into white and black” (xv) and decided that he was

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neither. Throughout the text, he relies on race not as a blatant subject, but rather as a platform to refute

its existence and limits. In “Becky” the weight of racial definitions within the community “filled her, like

a bubble rising—then she broke” (2011, p. 8). Castigated by both whites and blacks, she later dies and

her sons disappear. Questions surrounding Becky’s racialized existence with her two sons are equally

futile. Similar to “Blood Burning Moon” attempts to decipher Becky’s mixed race relations or qualify her

identity based on racial terms come up short as Toomer repeats the same epitaph at the start and close of

“Becky” – the “whisper” of the pines, the “aimless rustle” of the Bible on Becky’s mound.

This means that we can now look at the 1969 from a different angle. For readers, the cover is a

visible invitation to explore race, but the core of the text and perhaps Toomer’s intent is to unveil the

limits of that exploration. So in thinking about the relationship between text and cover, it is true that the

latter is rarely a true mirroring of the text and its message. In this instance, the cover is a preliminary tool

in helping the text accomplish its mission of deconstructing the romanticized theories and histories of

race and blackness.

3. 2011 Edition

Source: W.W. Norton & Company

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If the 1969 edition of Cane marks the rise of African American studies, the 2011 edition further

asserts Toomer as a literary figure and enigma. At the forefront is a portrait of Toomer by Winold Reiss,

drawn as part of his “New Negros” collection. Reiss believed that “by picturing the honor, beauty, and

dignity of all peoples, his art could help break down racial prejudices.”1 Like Toomer, Reiss placed faith

in an ideology that as Americans, we are nothing less than “us” – a totality that includes rather than

excludes. Toomer, after all, in moving beyond racial categorization, emphasized his existence as an

American.

While Cane was canonized in the 1960s for its unique form and commentary of race, it was not

until the decades to follow that Toomer’s biography became such a crucial resource to understanding the

text; because now Cane is looked upon as a text that embodies the essence of its author. The 2011 edition

reasons that Toomer was “socially constructing his racial indeterminacy and simultaneously

deconstructing his Negro ancestry” (xxxvii). Cane was born from Toomer’s voyage to the South, but it

was also his previous navigation of black and white worlds that strongly influenced the production of the

text. A native of Washington, D.C., Toomer was obviously an outsider in Georgia, yet he entered the

state with a “keen sense of Southern ancestry” (Ramsey, p. 75). The son of two African Americans,

Toomer’s father abandoned the family during his infancy and his maternal grandfather, P. B. S.

Pinchback, raised him. Born a free Negro in Macon, Georgia, Pinchback would raise Toomer in a

household with an acute consciousness of politics, race and the South. So despite being very much

dislocated in Georgia, Toomer’s familial roots and short tenure as principal of an agricultural school in

Sparta allowed him to be paradoxically in and a part of the Southern space too. It was this “bivalent

rhetorical perspective” that made possible the “unique creative vision” of Cane (Ramsey, p. 74).

Dissecting the Negro condition is a peculiar accomplishment for Toomer given his history of

passing. His lighter appearance served as a sort of invisible cloak he wore through various social circles,

though he denied any real intention of doing so when he claimed, “I have never tried to pass because I

1 The Reiss Partnership, winoldreiss.org/life/index.htm

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have never had to try” (Webb, p. 207). A mixed individual, Toomer identified the many facets of his

ancestry including Scotch, Welsh, German, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, “with some dark blood”

(xxxvii). But even after listing his racial composition, Toomer still asks, “Of which race am I?” to which

he declaratively answers: “…there can be but one true answer—I am of the human race” (xxxvii).

Toomer then could conceive of passing as not a practice of “misrepresenting one’s race, but of

misrepresenting oneself by race, as belonging to a race” (Webb, p. 207). Touted as the paragon of the

Black literary tradition, Toomer’s ascension into the canon is not simply a result of Cane’s form and

content, but of the difficulties he encountered as an author and mixed-race man attempting to resist a

“society structured by racial discourse” (Webb, p. 207).

Source: Biography – Jean Toomer: Poet, Playwright, Author

The complexities and contradictions of Toomer’s self-identification have led scholars to

continually delve into his biography. In placing Toomer at the forefront of its cover, the 2011 edition

makes explicit that one of the most important features of Cane is its author. Beyond penning the text, the

author contributes to a literary work’s “mode of existence, circulation, and functioning” (Lanser, p. 154)

– the irreproachable bond between artist and work melds the two into one subject so that “what they

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represent is what represents them” (Lanser, p. 154). Moreover, as Lanser posits, “having produced the

text, the author must surely exist outside and before the text; yet if the text produces the author, then the

author can only be found in the text” (Lanser, 154). So in Cane lies a wondrous geography through which

Toomer developed his understanding and critique of racial identity and relations – and in order to

establish a sense of Toomer’s persona, readers must embark on the journey of Cane while considering his

biographical history. This explains the extensive biographical research on Toomer that is included in

each edition of the text.

The 2011 edition might be a celebration of Toomer and acknowledges the importance of his

personal story in understanding Cane. Use of the portrait first and foremost implies that Cane is

autographical and in many ways, the text about the “impact of region upon [Toomer’s] imagination and

identity” (xiv). In a letter to Waldo Frank, Toomer admits, “Kabnis is Me” (xxv). The similarities

between the author and Ralph Kabnis are unparalleled: both are Northerners working in a Georgia

school, desperately at odds with the Southern locality they do not belong to. Just as Toomer was

“repulsed and enchanted by what he saw” (Ramsey, p. 75), Kabnis too is conflicted about his

environment: “There is a radiant beauty in the night that touches and…tortures me. Ugh. Hell” (p. 114).

Both figures are identities still in progress, continually being shaped by the interactions between their

race and geography.

Reiss’s portrait captures the sentiment of a man in progress. Toomer’s broad, yet arched

shoulders exude tension and discomfort. His face and hands appear weathered and worn; his eyes stare

away from the artist, something presumably occupying his mind. Moreover, the shadows and drops of

light Reiss shaping Toomer’s body somewhat blur his image. Neither fully illuminated nor hidden in

darkness, Toomer’s race is indecipherable.

Toomer’s decision to pass might serve as a symbol of how indefinite race is – one can move

through the definitions and in this way, Toomer might have been a martyr for living and working as a

person in progress, whose racial identity was not a crux. In a similar ethos, the 2011 publication comes

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towards the end of Obama’s first term as President; the American climate was supposedly categorized as

“post-racial.” The cover featuring Toomer’s portrait then is warranted and obviously differs from the

1969 cover as black incorporation in American society had reached a plateau - no longer a massive

urbanization. The landscape is no longer featured as the Black American had officially moved away from

his rural roots and more importantly he is no longer living in grotesque fear of the “White-man’s land”

(p. 142); for he has ascended to the oval office and now runs the entire landscape, whites and blacks

both. Thus, Toomer’s portrait implies that while our conceptions of race might still be shaped by

nature/environment, we have and continue to read race in individual appearance.

4.

Barely three years removed from the last edition of Cane, the state of racial relations between

blacks and whites in America has become depressingly worse. As Toomer once poignantly observed,

“Americans are locked in a web of uneasy racial interdependence created by the damaging and

contaminating legacy of shame, sexual exploitation and racial oppression” (Farebrother, p. 521).

Assumptions of a post-racial society deteriorated with news of the Trayvon Martin shooting in 2012.

The acquittal of George Zimmerman, the officer who fatally shot Martin, audibly sparked outrage

amongst the black community, yet the outcome was predicated upon “a system that inherently privileges

the rights of whites over blacks” and the “exercise of more rights for whites, including the right to kill

based simply out of the fear of blackness” (Noble, p. 15). Even President Obama lamented in saying that

Trayvon could’ve been him – a gesture that urged, in spite of much progress, underlying and unjust

narratives still exist in this country.

In 2014, the criminality of the black body intensified with the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael

Brown. The failed indictment of Officer Darren Wilson set off riots in Ferguson, MO and protests

around the country that lasted into the night. #BlackLivesMatter, the hashtag first created in response to

the Martin case, was resurrected and organized millions around the world searching for a way to

communicate their own reactions. Less than a month later, the grand jury of New York decided to not

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indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo. Calling an end to racial profiling by police, thousands gathered in

Washington, D.C. and New York to show support of the black community on December 13, 2014.

Despite the shift in landscape from rural to urban, the perpetual policing of the black body

makes Toomer’s unraveling of racial categorization and its consequences in Cane very relevant today. In

constructing a paratextual response to Toomer’s message and this specific historical moment, the

following cover was created:

Excluding both the rural and Toomer’s authorial figure, the cover of our contemporary moment

attempts to enact “black social death” through an abstract form (Noble, p. 14). Seeing beyond the

geography of the rural or urban, the simple white background represents the American consciousness of

which the central black figure lies across. Symbolizing the black body, the figure is notably distorted and

stretched in opposing directions – its disfigurement mirroring the exploitation and disregard of the black

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body in the same “White-man’s land” mentioned in “Kabnis” (p. 142). The monochrome form of black-

and-white creates a visible tension, while connoting a sense of history, more popularly illustrated in

photographs. The contrasting colors mark the dividing lines typically drawn between whites and blacks,

yet the abstract form also presents an image dependent upon binary oppositions. The use of black helps

to define the white seen on the cover, and vice versa. To define the cover, as predominantly white or

black is to mimic the conflicted self-identification of Toomer’s own mixed ancestry.

The book’s title additionally provides a vivid flash of red, drawing upon emotions such as anger

and love typically ascribed to the color; emotions that also fill the pages of Cane’s prose and poems.

Moreover, the red emphasizes the killing of the black body by drawing Toomer’s work in the blood of

Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Mike Brown. Under conditions in which “the status of second-class

citizenship [has] been imposed on [this] racial group” there exists a “reason to believe that the

significance of writing…can be equally a matter of politics and aesthetics” (Warren, p. 740) – the 2014

cover captures this sentiment and the broader ideological motivation for the production of Cane. Yet

given the urgency of the text’s message in today’s time it might be that Toomer’s optimistic view of an

America living beyond race might never be possible.

5.

Notable for its innovation and supplemented with extensive and research on its author, Cane

continues to be a landmark in African American literature. Just as he disrupts and breaks traditional

forms of literary construction by piecing together and shifting between pieces of prose and poetry, so

too does Toomer “deconstruct America’s peculiar social definitions of race” (2011, xv). And while race

is irrefutable in its pages, it is Toomer’s pointed lack of confidence in racial categorization that makes the

production of his most famous work all the more interesting. For even ten years after Cane was

published, Toomer resisted being labeled a black writer. To the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper, he

bluntly states, “I have not lived as [a Negro] nor do I really know whether there is colored blood in me

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or not” (2011, lxix). Toomer not only undercuts his own unique authorial perspective, but here is an

“anguished effort to liberate himself from his apparent anxiety and ambivalence about his black

ancestry” (2011, lxix).

A closer examination of the text does gesture towards Toomer’s understanding of the limits of

race. But the subjectivity of interpreting a literary work’s text bleeds into its cover too. For Cane not only

warrants consideration due to its membership of the literary canon, but it is a work that continues to

hold relevance throughout history. Though no changes have been made to the text, each new edition

brings with it a different cover, a recapitulation of Toomer’s message. A consequence a book cover must

bear is that the act of it being read is “intimately connected with selling it, part of the creation of

markets, the production of book categories, and reading audiences” (Kratz, p. 185). Covers, then, are not

just responses to its adjoining text, but also the historical and cultural moment it is produced. With this

in mind, reading Cane through an aesthetic mode lends new insight to how the text illustrates its ideas of

race and how readers interpret it.

In evaluating the original cover of Cane along with those of the 1969 and 2011 editions, Cane’s

textual commentary on racial constraints have successfully been projected outwardly for readers to

interpret. Reflecting Toomer’s message these covers illustrate race, as a critical feature of the work

without implicating it as a venerated subject the author was passionate about. As a work whose mood

and method are contentiously reflected upon, Cane will likely influence “the writing about Negros by

others” (2011, lviii) for years, even centuries to come. If so it is imperative that scholars and readers alike

consider the tensions crystalized in the convergence between text and cover.

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Annotated Bibliography

Farebrother, Rachel. ""Adventuring through the Pieces of a Still Unorganized Mosaic": Reading Jean

Toomer's Collage Aesthetic in "Cane"" Journal of American Studies 40.3 (2006): 503-21. JSTOR. Web.

24 Nov. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/27557858?ref=no-x-

route:28804cbdacbcde4869216a57cafc58d9>.

Garcia, Jay. ""An Attitude That Could Act Upon Modernity": Versions of Jean Toomer." History of the

Present 4.1 (2014): 23-48. JSTOR. Web. 24 Nov. 2014.

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/historypresent.4.1.0023?ref=no-x-

route:0706f2df543a3c26c63665025f540843>.

Goede, William J. "Jean Toomer's Ralph Kabnis: Portrait of the Negro Artist as a Young Man." Phylon (1960-

) 30.1 (1969): 73-85. JSTOR. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/273361?ref=no-x-

route:22185da4c721a922e08f094db1dc3eaf>.

Golden, Lizzie Thomas. "Change and Duality: Black Poetry and the 1960s." Journal of Black Studies 12.1 (1981):

91-106. Web. 01 Dec. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2784152?ref=no-x-

route:0ad6bf0732a50405c52584d1ac5969cf>.

Goldfield, David. "The Urban Crusade: Race, Culture and Power in the American South since

1945." Amerikastudien / American Studies 42.2, The South (1997): 181-95. Web. 01 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/41157265?ref=no-x-

route:980068caaa831476f36b3449928e003d>.

Kratz, Corinne A. "On Telling/Selling a Book by Its Cover." Cultural Anthropology 9.2 (1994):

179-200. JSTOR. Web. 15 Nov. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/656239?ref=no-x-

route:93c7259dec58329f3b6e0dbc7c5725f0>.

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Kratz’s article explores the various ways in which book covers can be used to tell and sell a book visually. The notion of “judging a book by its cover” is a critical process of “reading” the cover – of interpreting the allegorical narrative as assembled by the objects, setting and personas chosen by the author and designer. Both the perception and construction of how book covers relate to the actual text is motivated by culture, history and politics. This source provides me with a preliminary, but solid understanding of how book covers can function.

Lanser, Susan S. "(Im)plying the Author." Narrative 9.2, Contemporary Narratology (2001): 153-60. JSTOR.

Web. 01 Dec. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/20107241?ref=no-x-

route:05a49afef45735118bea61ee37b63317>.

McGann, Jerome. "Visible and Invisible Books: Hermetic Images in N-Dimensional Space." New

Literary History 32.2, Reexamining Critical Processing (2001): 283-300. JSTOR. Web. 15 Nov. 2014.

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/20057659?ref=no-x-

route:4f7fdc7db8215c7be6c3d1a0cb5e9c80>.

McGann’s article challenges me and readers generally to think about what defines a literary work and more importantly, what are its parts and how do they function. Critical representations, book covers for example, are not exactly straightforward reflections of the text – there is chance for change, deforming objects, and intentional ambiguity. This source leads me to ask, “How do Toomer’s ideas of race and nature function inside the text and outside in its book covers?”

Newman, J. K. "Text vs. Author." The Classical Journal 84.3 (1989): 232-38. JSTOR. Web. 01 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/3297515?ref=no-x-

route:f8c838241f52213d28a2181773f36a51>.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. "Teaching Trayvon: Race, Media, and the Politics of Spectacle." The Black Scholar 44.1

(2014): 12-29. JSTOR. Web. 13 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5816/blackscholar.44.1.0012?ref=no-x-

route:4981d9e263bebfa315d2ddfdc70b2f24>.

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Ortiz-Monasterio, Ignacio. "Jean Toomer's "Kabnis" and the Language of Dreams." The Southern Literary

Journal 38.2 (2006): 19-39. JSTOR. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/20078441?ref=no-x-

route:c1a8688d4a718951c935de532c09697a>.

Ramsey, William M. "Jean Toomer's Eternal South." The Southern Literary Journal 36.1 (2003):

74-89. JSTOR. Web. 15 Nov. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/20078383?ref=no-x-

route:9ff2b525abe78d407dde60f36877dd6e>.

Ramsey presents a dynamic and critical analysis of Toomer’s Cane through the specific lens of locality or geography. The idea and setting of the American South is central to this text, and Ramsey identifies two deviations of Toomer’s use of the South: one as temporal and one as eternal. This piece is a substantial resource for breaking down Toomer’s text and defining what the role of “nature” is for “Cane.” There are also useful moments that seek to explore the racial codes and African American history the text incorporates.

Thomas, Brian W. "Struggling With the Past: Some Views of African-American Identity." International Journal

of Historical Archaeology 6.2 (2002): 143-51. JSTOR. Web. 01 Dec. 2014.

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/20852996?ref=no-x-

route:59d6b37c0b88fb4ef45b5ea7358db27f>.

Trumbo, Jean. "Visual Literacy and the Environment." Frontiers in Ecology and the

Environment 5.8 (2007): 443-44. JSTOR. Web. 15 Nov. 2014.

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/20440732?ref=no-x-

route:65a022d9ba055bc0c67c636bb9b83e4a>.

Trumbo’s article provides insight to the concept of visual literacy, our capacity to discern, perceive and interpret images, environments, and symbols. Though brief, this piece has theory that complements the more general notions of Kratz’s article. Visual literacy will be useful when considering how audiences responded to both the content and covers of Toomer’s Cane during the particular moment in history they were produced in.

Warren, Kenneth W. "On "What Was African American Literature?"" Amerikastudien / American Studies 55.4

(2010): 739-42. Web. 01 Dec. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/41158726>.

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"Winold Reiss - Early Modernist in 20th Century American Art and Design." Winold Reiss - Early Modernist in

20th Century American Art and Design. The Reiss Partnership, n.d. Web. 14 Nov. 2014.