Month: March 2020

Hello Fellows!

I’m sorry I’ve been a bit out of touch. This has been a WEEK! It’s been simultaneously highly stressful and totally boring… #LousyCombinations

In this post I want to update you all on how we’re approaching next week’s switch to remote instruction, which will probably involve a lot of &^#%$&#%#&%.

But as Drew reminds us, “We’ve got this.” #GoodRemindersFromDrew

I’m using a list format in the hopes that it will make this information easier to digest. Let me know if it doesn’t:

1.  Confirm your email
2. Can you meet on Tuesday during our class time?
3. Can you do a practice session on Sunday at 4pm?

The following is a quote from Elise Johnson McDougald’s “The Double Task: The Struggle of the Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation.” First published in March 1925 in Survey Graphic magazine, the article was then retitled and published in Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro–a selection from which we read earlier this semester. This quote will be useful as we think about Larsen’s Passing:

Like women in general, but more particularly like those of other oppressed minorities, the Negro woman has been forced to submit to overpowering conditions. Pressure has been exerted upon her, both from without and within her group. Her emotional and sex life is a reflex of her economic station. The women of the working class will react, emotionally and sexually, similar to the  working-class women of other races. The Negro woman does not maintain any moral standard which may be assigned chiefly to the qualities of race, any more than the white woman does. Yet she has been singled out and advertised as having lower sex standards. Superficial critics who have had contact with only the lower grades of Negro women, claim that they are more immoral than other groups of women. This I deny. This is the sort of criticism which predicated of one race, to its detriment, that which is common to all races. Sex irregularities are not a matter of race, but of socio-economic traditions. Research shows that most of the African tribes from which the Negro sprang have strict codes for sex relations. There is no proof of inherent weakness in the ethnic group.

Gradually overcoming the habitual limits imposed upon her by slave masters, she increasingly seeks legal sanction for the consummation and dissolution of sex contracts. Contrary to popular belief, illegitimacy among Negroes is cause for shame and grief. When economic, social, and biological forces combined bring about unwed motherhood, the reaction is much the same in families of other racial groups …

We will discuss this amazing paragraph today.

“Box Seat” may be one of the most intriguing and perplexing pieces in Jean Toomer’s Cane. However, in a short 1988 article, Sandra Flowers argues that the usage of imagery in this piece is used to denounce Black middle class values at the time. In the piece, Flowers remarked that there were three main types of imagery: enclosure, locking and positioning. Enclosure imagery is used throughout the piece, most notably when Dan is entering the house and must pass through an iron gate, symbolically representing the separation between him and Muriel. The use of locking imagery is also used frequently, such as when Muriel and Ms. Pribby sit down and “click” into place in their seats, showing the way that are locked into their class. The use of positioning imagery is mostly used during the theater scene, such as when Muriel symbolically tells her friend Bernice (who is of a lower class) to sit behind her, literally showing the class difference between them and emphasizing her superiority. This positioning also shows the way that Muriel was close to the underclass, but tried her best to outdistance her past by placing it behind her. Therefore, the coalescence of these different types of imagery in “Box Seat” represent Toomer’s disdain for the way that the Black middle class was unwilling to cross class lines.

Flowers, Sandra. “Solving the Critical Conundrum of Jean Toomer’s ‘Box Seat.’” Studies in Short Fiction 25, no. 3 (June 1988): 301–6.

The Yellin article takes the form of a brief analysis of Toomer’s story “Fern,” and a greater analysis of Toomer himself. Yellin focuses on the self-loathing relationship that seems central to Toomer’s grappling with his own identity, and how this intersects with the Jewish-American experience found in Waldo Frank’s Our America.  In “Fern” Toomer frames Fern, the title character, as an African American woman, and as Jewish through her last name, Rosen. Toomer does this because both groups share a history of slavery and suffering, which Toomer alludes to by mentioning a “common river delta.” However, the two authors differ on the value of suffering. Yellin explains that Frank views suffering as positive and something redemptive. Toomer instead frames suffering as a necessary price for forming one’s identity. Yellin finally manages to communicate his greatest point, that to Toomer, “Fern” was simply too personal for him to even discuss it. Fern, the character, seems to embody the confident, and knowledgeable portion of Toomer’s identity, trying to reconcile with his mixed heritage. Yellin supports his point by citing the editing of the book, where Toomer flat-out refuses to discuss “Fern”, showing it was simply too personal for Toomer to even discuss.

Yellin, Michael. 2009. “Visions of Their America: Waldo Frank’s Jewish-Modernist Influence on Jean Toomer’s ‘Fern.’” African American Review 43 (2/3): 427–42.

In the essay Myth and Narrative Fiction in Cane: “Blood-Burning Moon”, Alain Solard uses the various settings and motivations of the characters to examine whether Toomer uses the story to initiate protest or if the motif is utilized to depict the passions of the “southern collective soul”. Solard uses the first part of the essay to delve into the heightened interplay of visual and auditory contrasts, especially Black folk symbols like the “Blood Burning Moon” which symbolizes impending doom and evil. Another element of Black folk tradition that Toomer draws on, according to Solard, is the incantation that is rooted in the repetition of slow and drawn out sounds, words, and rhythms that interact with each other to create a soulful effect. Solard emphasizes how the “Blood-Burning Moon” is a tale of Southern Blacks with a vernacular reminiscent of the blues to symbolize the “inescapable tragedy of Negroes in America”. Solard argues that the white character that Toomer uses (Bob Stone) represents an intersection between folklore and history because his actions reflect his “nostalgia for a vanished supremacy and his own yearning for a fusion with blackness”, which is portrayed through his attraction to Louisa. Overall, the essay draws on the duality of the humanity, the race, the natural, and the mythical elements of “Blood-Burning Moon” to show contrasting elements of awareness for racism, whilst also romanticizing the elements of Black folklore. 

Citation: 

Solard, Alain. “Myth and Narrative Fiction in Cane: “Blood-Burning Moon”.” Callaloo, no. 25 (1985): 551-62. Accessed February 27, 2020. doi:10.2307/2930826.

In his analysis of Cane, William Ramsey fixates on the significance of Toomer’s dual perspective on the South and how that affects the deep southern religion and culture visualized in Cane. Ramsey discusses that Toomer is both an outsider and an insider when it comes to the South; he possesses familial roots within southern states like Georgia and Louisiana. So, despite spending little of his life living there, he is not a stranger to the “Black South.” Ramsey pinpoints Toomer’s dual-perspective as the reason for the “two Souths” presented in Cane: the “temporal” South and the “eternal” South. Ramsey acknowledges that Toomer’s position is unique and significant to the reading of Cane.

Ramsey highlights the points Toomer makes about religion in the Black South. He argues that Toomer aligned himself with this community for their rejection of the “spiritual vacuity of modernism,” which Toomer found to be stifling compared to the transcendent southern Black folk culture. Toomer believed the “temporal” South was the history of oppression and stagnation while the “eternal” South was the everlasting culture that ascended past oppressive social mores. Ramsey writes about how Toomer admired the black southern communities for embodying this “eternal” South and resisting oppression while remaining full of life. On the other hand, Ramsey notes that Toomer did take issue with the black church which he believed was corrupted by white theology and was leading those in the community to repress themselves.

Ramsey, William M. “Jean Toomer’s eternal South.” The Southern Literary Journal 36, no. 1 (2003): 74-89. Gale Literature Resource Center (accessed February 28, 2020). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A111982124/GLS?u=vic_uor&sid=GLS&xid=607670aa.

In “By the Pale Dull Pallor of an Old Gas Light,” Steven Nardi argues Langston Hughes’ “The Weary Blues” speaks to a “disjunction” between poets and musicians, as well as a sense of loss for a culture changed by modernization (Nardi 256). Nardi marks the influence of modernization at play in Hughes’ “The Weary Blues” by noting the transition from gas to electric lighting at the turn of the century. Nardi argues that the musician represents an older generation left behind by the modernization of the city, as he plays alone in the dark without electricity and is later described as a “rock” or a “man that’s dead” (Hughes). Nardi highlights the sense of disconnect between Hughes’ narration as a poet and the musician by noting the “rhythmically distinct” natures of poetry and music, as Hughes employs “mostly iambic couplets” for the speaker’s voice while utilizing a “four beat, ballad stanza” for the musician’s voice (Nardi 258). According to Nardi, the rhythmic distinctions between Hughes’ and the subject of his poem demonstrate an “unbridgeable difference” between Hughes’ poetry and jazz music, which speaks to a larger disconnect between Hughes and African American folk culture (Nardi 257). Nardi argues “The Weary Blues” was written at a time in which Hughes “found a balance between the competing demands of his own poetic voice, and the voices of the silenced black culture that Hughes found himself excluded from” (Nardi 255). Through analyzing the technological context, rhythmic differences in the speaker and musician’s voices, and the poem’s interplay with blues and jazz music, Nardi argues that “The Weary Blues” encapsulates the dilemma between the folk and modernity, a pressing issue for Hughes and his contemporaries.

Nardi, Steven A. “‘By the Pale Dull Pallor of an Old Gas Light’: Technology and Vision in Langston Hughes’s ‘The Weary Blues.’” In New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance: Essays on Race, Gender, and Literary Discourse, ed. by Australia Tarver and Paula C. Barnes. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. 253–68. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mlf&AN=2006297637&site=ehost-live.