As an author of the Harlem Renaissance, Jean Toomer wrote for an audience composed of more than his peers. With Cane (Toomer, 1923), he reached for a black audience in search of identity. Influenced by classical poets William Blake and Walt Whitman, “stream-of-consciousness” novelist James Joyce, and novelist Sherwood Anderson’s short story collection, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Cane also addresses a white audience receptive to the minority and mixed races that culturalist Onita Estes-Hicks refers to as “buried cultures,” as a way of fostering and supporting group identity. It is also highly likely that Toomer wrote for himself, as a way of examining his own understanding of race and identity complexities.
The value of Cane to black studies lies …show more content…
The black people of this section are descendants and survivors of Old South culture. Their life occurs in the America that has survived the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, and World War I. As part of the Great Migration, the characters are part of a new black generation, seeking a new kind of life and hope in the urban …show more content…
Instead, he uses images of city streets, night clubs, jazzy clothes and cars, and electricity, to evoke Northern movement and modernity. Language becomes sharper, suggesting a syncopated jazz tone. In “Rhobert,” proximity to urban life breaks and dissipates a black man by forcing him into wage-slavery, while in “Avey,” a black woman loses herself to wanton indulgence, and the man who thought he loved her can only mourn the loss of what he thought he would become with her – a metaphor for the life and identity sought through the Great
The value of Cane to black studies lies …show more content…
The black people of this section are descendants and survivors of Old South culture. Their life occurs in the America that has survived the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Great Depression, and World War I. As part of the Great Migration, the characters are part of a new black generation, seeking a new kind of life and hope in the urban …show more content…
Instead, he uses images of city streets, night clubs, jazzy clothes and cars, and electricity, to evoke Northern movement and modernity. Language becomes sharper, suggesting a syncopated jazz tone. In “Rhobert,” proximity to urban life breaks and dissipates a black man by forcing him into wage-slavery, while in “Avey,” a black woman loses herself to wanton indulgence, and the man who thought he loved her can only mourn the loss of what he thought he would become with her – a metaphor for the life and identity sought through the Great