The Experiment in America

This chapter analyzes Toomer's relationship with the early 1920s modernists dubbing themselves “Young America”—particularly with novelist Waldo Frank, whose influential Our America (1919) advocated a pluralistic and experimental program for national cultural renewal. In this program, the notion of sectional art figured as a highly contradictory ideologeme, at once promising a strategy for including the nation's marginalized peoples and papering over the reasons for their exclusion. While it is proposed that Toomer retreated from Young America because of his distress at Frank's allusions to Toomer's African American ancestry in his foreword to Cane, the chapter argues that Toomer's growing skepticism about the possibility that cultural pluralism could produce social change is what caused his eventual break with Frank's project.