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Chapter 7 Black and Brown Worlds Heaving Upward Part 2 of Cane Becoming is . . . the mediation between past and future. . . . When the concrete here and now dissolves into a process . . . it is the focus of the deepest and most widely ramified mediation, the focus of decision and the birth of the new. Man must be able to comprehend the present as a becoming. He can do this by seeing in it the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition he can make the future. Only when he does this will the present be a process of becoming that belongs to him. —Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness A rumble comes from the earth’s deep core. It is the mutter of powerful underground races. —Jean Toomer, Cane In part 2 of Cane, Toomer’s critique of capitalist modernity comes to the fore. The voice heard in his New York Call writings of 1919 and 1920 is once again audible, and the 1919 Washington race riot—for him the key domestic event emerging from the postwar conjuncture—signals the arrival of the urban New Negro as history-making proletarian. Situated mostly in the nation’s capital, the stories and poems here call into question the limitations of metonymic nationalism; if the liberation of the submerged masses is to occur, it will have to be part of a worldwide “heaving upward” of the “underground races” of the globe. Yet the exchange relation is also shown to dominate each and every human interaction; the very spaces within which modern city dwellers work, live, and revel are confined and constrained by a universal commodification that compels critical commentary. Faced with the task of representing this contradictory modern reality is the figure of the New Negro as artist: the poetic-narratorial presence struggling to represent the folk/peasantry in “Kabnis” and part 1 here struggles for an avant-garde aesthetic that can do justice to the complexity of African American life in the urban capitalist setting. Whether the New Negro will succeed in this project, however—either as artist or as political rebel—is left open to question. The eruption of antiracist class struggle along Seventh Street is threatened with absorption into a regime of reification that invades every corner of life. Even as the project of sectional art—and 222 Part II its accompanying combinatoire of metaphors drawn from the organic trope—is clearly incapable of supplying second-order mediations that can account for the sources of urban alienation, the futuristic language of the machine lacks both a coherent iconography and an audience capable of recognizing itself in a new and different system of representations. Toomer’s montage in part 2 exhibits the dialectical vision of totality briefly made available in the wake of the global radical upsurge of 1919. But while the text provides glimpses of a possible revolutionary future, the urban section of Cane ends up testifying to the arrested dialectic of history: antinomic oscillation between the poles of irony and nostalgia prevails over dialectical negation and sublation. As with “Kabnis” and part 1, it is useful to bear in mind the order in which the different pieces gathered in part 2 were composed. Most of the poems and short pieces clustered in the first half—from “Seventh Street” through “Calling Jesus”—were written between January and July 1922, more or less simultaneously with the texts that open part 1, from “Karintha” through “Fern.” With the exception of “Bona and Paul,” the pieces that close part 2 were written more or less simultaneously with “Esther” and “Blood-Burning Moon.” The contrast between texts written before and after the fall 1922 trip to Spartanburg with Waldo Frank is, if anything, more pronounced in part 2 than in part 1; in particular, “Box Seat”—the last-written short story in the collection—exhibits the felt need for a revolutionary challenge to the status quo that Toomer experienced in the wake of his re-exposure to the Deep South. The fact that Toomer brackets the urban section of Cane with pieces dating from his early attraction to leftist politics— “Seventh Street” recalls his August 1919 essay “Reflections on the Race Riots,” while his still earlier introduction to socialism in Chicago in 1916 is in the background of “Bona and Paul”—further indicates that he had by no means ceased yearning for proletarian revolution as he put the final touches on his text. That the text exhibits a sense of diminished possibility does not mean that...

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