Reading Cane in the Anthropocene: Toomer on Race, Power, and Nature

While scientists debate the geological legacy of the human species—is our impact best measured by the radioactive material evident in growth rings of trees¹ or the inevitable layer of plastics that will be preserved in the fossil record?—others in the humanities and social sciences caution that the concept of the Anthropocene reifies the centrality of the white male. The Anthropocene, or "human age" (from the Greek Anthropos), is the proposed name for the new geological epoch defined by the irreversible, collective human impact on the Earth, but as nuclear scholar Gabrielle Hecht writes in "African Anthropocene," we must be sensitive to the "centuries-old conflation of human with white man" (n.p.). One of the great contradictions of the Anthropocene is that those least responsible for initiating global environmental crises are most vulnerable to things like species extinction, resource shortage, and extreme weather events. While Hecht is a proponent of thinking through the Anthropocene concept, and acknowledges that material conditions warrant the naming of a new epoch, she warns that it potentially "attributes ecological collapse to an undifferentiated 'humanity,' when in practice both responsibility and vulnerability are unevenly distributed" (n.p.). In this sense, texts that capture the experiences of these more vulnerable bodies can remind us that the same power structures and systems that set the Anthropocene in motion, and secured humans as the dominant species on the planet, also distributed power and agency unequally among members of the same species. Reading Jean Toomer's masterpiece Cane (1923) in the Anthropocene means confronting the range of human relationships with the Earth and acknowledging that these relationships are always mediated by power structures; yet, Cane makes clear, any expression of human power can only temporarily mitigate the same vulnerabilities that plague the bodies it attempts to control. Ultimately, whether master or slave, a body needs nourishment and is subject to the same effects of time and mortality. Indeed, Toomer's Cane has much to imagine about our strange new reality, here in the Anthropocene. As Cane engages the specific material conditions of impactful human systems such as agribusiness, sugar production, and the lumber industry, it captures the complexity of this world that we are bound to and intensely affected by, despite any delusions of mastery.

Cane denounces human exceptionalism and recovers nature, but this is not the sanitized, Western, passive construction of nature from which people of color have suffered and generally been excluded. Cane's nature is vibrant, unpredictable, varied, inclusive, and other. Perhaps more importantly, Cane demands that we acknowledge the many ways humans, nonhumans, nature, and culture are inextricably entangled, so that it is impossible to consider the natural world in Cane without treating histories implicit in the environments inscribed there. By doing so, however, we "free" nature—it is not what we thought it was. Although debate over the naming of the Anthropocene continues,² the fact that a new geological epoch defined by human impact is upon us is generally agreed upon, which is to say that the Anthropocene is far from a "social construction." There are both material and discursive implications of the Anthropocene—like modernity, the term refers to a variety of changes that are both epistemological and ontological. Yet, whether we decide to think through the Anthropocene or not, the phenomenon that this term describes is there, initiated by us and acting on us, now independent of human life yet deeply entangled with it. A similar reality motivates new material feminists Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman to reclaim nature, not as a social construct, but as an

active, signifying force; an agent in its own terms; a realm of multiple, inter- and intra-active cultures. This sort of nature—a nature that is, expressly, not the mirror image of culture—is emerging from the overlapping fields of material feminism, environmental philosophy, and green cultural studies.

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This nature, which is not the "repository of sexism, racism, and homophobia" (12), has rich applications for the study of African American literature, including Cane, in the Anthropocene.

The vitality of the material world throws...