SOURCE: “Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse,” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 35, No. 2, Summer, 1993, pp. 226-50.

In the following essay, Hutchinson contends that the predominant motif of Cane is the author's exploration of his own racial identity.

The culture which will transcend, and thus unite, East and West, or the Earthlings and the Galactics, is not likely to be one which does equal justice to each, but one which looks back on both with the amused condescension typical of later generations looking back at their ancestors.¹

Knowledge of what cannot be said … signals the rock-bottom shape, the boundaries, of our situation in the world; it is the ethical, in the classical sense of the term.²

An undated poem kept in a tin box that no one but the author ever saw in his lifetime bears haunting witness to the great lack of Jean Toomer's existence...