Modern by Accident

Abstract

Jean Toomer’s 1923 hybrid-genre book Cane was long considered the first African American literary modernist work, and many contemporary critics lauded it for capturing the South accurately. This chapter argues that Toomer’s attempts to depict rural Black primitives failed because his formal experiments with fragmented narrative and temporal sequences undermined them. Following W. E. B. Du Bois, the chapter challenges Cane’s cultural-geographical adequacy. It argues that Toomer’s fictionalized portrait of Sparta, Georgia, fails to grasp the situation on the ground there because the author’s limited familiarity with rural life and culture led him to suppose that rural Southern communities were uniform and interchangeable. The result is a literary collage that distorts the tenor of local anti-Black violence, the character of the rural African American agricultural school that inspired him, and the impact of the ecological catastrophe Toomer witnessed first-hand while gathering material for his book.