The Roots of Cane proposes a new way to read one of the most significant works of the New Negro Renaissance, Jean Toomer鈥檚 Cane. Rather than focusing on the form of the book published by Boni and Liveright, what Toomer would later call a single textual 鈥渙rganism,鈥 John Young traces the many pieces of Cane that were dispersed across multiple modernist magazines from 1922 through 1923. These periodicals ranged from primarily political monthlies to avant-garde arts journals to regional magazines with transnational aspirations.
Young interweaves a periodical-studies approach to modernism with book history and critical race theory, resituating Toomer鈥檚 uneasy place within Black modernism by asking how original readers would have encountered his work. The different contexts in which those audiences were engaging with Toomer鈥檚 portraits of racialized identity in the Jim Crow United States, yield often surprising results.
鈥淥ne of the greatest strengths of Young鈥檚 book is his careful attention to the editorial and personnel shifts in the magazines he examines, and he avoids falling into the all-too-common mistake in periodical studies of portraying a magazine鈥檚 history as homogenous from beginning to end. . . . Young also shows how magazines themselves can be understood as 鈥榳orks鈥 in multiple senses鈥攖hat is, both a single issue and the entire run of a magazine might be read as a complete works. . . . The Roots of Cane makes valuable contributions to modernist studies, Toomer scholarship, and periodical studies.鈥濃American Literary History Review
