Cane in the Magazines: Race, Form, and Global Periodical Networks

While critics have puzzled over and tried to explain the formal experimentation of Jean Toomer’s Cane, the text’s embeddedness in global periodical networks has been mostly overlooked. Toomer’s writings, before and after Cane, were published in periodicals, particularly modernist little magazines and The Crisis magazine, and I argue that analyses of Cane’s hybrid form must take into account Toomer’s publication of portions of Cane in various magazines before publishing it as a book. Reading Cane through the lens of periodical studies reanimates our understanding of the text, its readership, and the periodicals in the context of regional, national, and global networks.