Jean Toomer’s Cane and the Borderlands of Encounter and Contradiction

Abstract

Abstract This article looks at Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) through the theoretical framework of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003), arguing that Cane might best be understood as a text focused on borders. In doing so, the article puts forth the claim that the ideas of “contradiction” and “beside” offer important insights into understanding the formal innovations and thematic qualities of Cane. Specifically, by focusing on the text’s use of migration as a meaningful aesthetic category, the essay unsettles recent literary historical questions about Toomer’s personal identifications, instead looking at how contradiction and paradox generate a text whose flows, moves, and shifts insist on multiplicity and movement.