Barbara Foley's new book on Jean Toomer continues her long-term interest in excavating the importance of communist ideas and affiliations to African American modernist literature. After her acclaimed account of Ralph Ellison's long-occluded debts to the left in Wrestling with the Left: The Making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, her new work returns to the arguments of her 2003 book Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro.Footnote ¹ This tracked how the “New Negro” of 1919, fired by radical socialism and keen to build interracial coalitions among American workers, was transformed into The New Negro (1925), the major anthology of the Harlem Renaissance which saw cultural nationalism as African America's most promising method of political praxis. Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution tightens the focus of this broad picture, as Foley positions Toomer's masterpiece Cane (1923) as torn between the competing claims of cultural nationalism and revolutionary international socialism at a crucial moment for America's radical left. In doing so she again displays the great merits of her revisionary scholarship: an ability to use astonishing discoveries from the historical and biographical archive to deliver arresting new readings of classic African American texts.

The new book centers on two major reevaluations of Toomer's biography. One is over the strength and duration of his interests in socialist ideas, challenging a narrative – which Toomer himself often reinforced – that these were abruptly terminated by a brief stint working in a New Jersey shipyard in 1919. Based on two neglected autobiographical manuscripts which give a startlingly different perspective on his shipyard experience, Foley crafts a picture of Toomer as a long-term man of the left, still affirming the importance of socialism well into the 1930s. In doing so, Foley replaces the view of Toomer as a visionary fascinated by a postracial future in an exceptionalist America, positioning him instead as a keen student of the historical emergence of race under the particular conditions of American capitalism. The more sensational biographical claim, however, surrounds Toomer's mercurial father, a man who abandoned Toomer's mother when Toomer was a young boy and who is generally regarded as little more than a painful absence in Toomer's life. Foley's research into Nathan Toomer's biography establishes not only that Jean Toomer had a half-sister by Nathan's first marriage – Mamie Toomer – but also that she was almost abducted from a convent at age fourteen by her adult step-brother, who had become sexually infatuated with her. Moreover, Foley establishes that much of Nathan Toomer's wealth derived from his marriage to Amanda America Dickson, famous in her time as “the wealthiest colored woman in the world” (134), and whose fortune was inherited from the Georgia plantation estates of her white father; her mother had been a slave and concubine. There is no direct evidence that Toomer knew these facts, but Foley plausibly claims that they were so widely known in the circles Toomer moved in that he probably did. If so, she contends, Cane's “Gothicism stems not so much from a generalized awareness of the interracial sexual mingling in the Deep South as from the rattling of various unquiet ghosts inhabiting Toomer's own family dungeon” (122). As such, Foley gives Cane's immersion in the politics of racial–sexual exploitation, peon labor, and the long legacies of the southern slave plantocracy a sharply biographical edge. In particular, Mamie Toomer, whom Foley calls Toomer's “dark sister” (120), becomes a haunting presence in Cane, informing many of Toomer's memorable characterizations of rural, southern African American women.

Part Two of the book moves on to close readings of Cane, readings which often track Toomer's exploration of what Foley calls the trope of “metonymic nationalism,” namely “a signifying chain connecting folk with soil with region with nation” (5). This trope was central to American culture in the 1920s; it underpinned the Harlem Renaissance and also the “Young American” cultural nationalism of Jean Toomer's mentor and close friend Waldo Frank. Yet Foley positions it as a wrong turn, a strategy which ultimately only reenforced “the imperatives of a revitalized and hegemonic capitalism that codified uneven geographic development not as an inspiration to global revolution, but instead as a central component of the nation's economy and culture” (6). Cane alternates between endorsement and critique of “metonymic nationalism,” sometimes entranced by its promise to find cultural citizenship in the blood-soaked soil of Georgia, and sometimes reading that terrain as marked solely by a brutal history of labor oppression. It is in such oscillations that Cane's status as a masterpiece emerges, a text whose formal and thematic features register a political unconscious of the “arrested dialectic” of history in the failure of the wave of strikes, labor activism, and race riots in 1919 to deliver revolutionary change in America. Such unfiltered Marxist readings are something of a rarity these days in American modernist studies. Nonetheless, Foley's discoveries in Toomer's biographical archive, and her unfailing ability to bring the racial–economic detail of Georgia, Washington, DC, and Chicago in the early 1920s into illuminating contact with the text of Cane, make this an indispensable book for Toomer scholars and a heavyweight assessment of the politics of the Harlem Renaissance.