Literary Ethnomusicology and the Soundscape of Jean Toomer's Cane

Abstract

This essay develops an ethnomusicological approach to Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) to underscore its historical significance as a record of African American music, to reveal its unique formal qualities as a literary montage with an advanced musical narrative architecture, and to demonstrate how questions of race, trauma, and modernity become articulated through the text's sonic dimensions. The essay establishes literary ethnomusicology as a term that signifies the practice of participant observation and interpretation of musical cultures, as well as the result of that practice: a textual product in the form of a literary, aesthetically innovative, yet also partly empirical account of the expression of cultural values through music. Reading Cane as a literary version of African American music and as an account of the culture that produced that music reveals how the text's musical poetics, experimental narrativity, and representations of music-making develop through and across the interplaying portions that comprise Cane as a whole. Among the ethnomusical elements are the pervasive and interactive musicality of its poetics, the ways in which that musicality resonates throughout the prose sections, and the sustained musical and sonic interplay that underscores and connects seemingly disparate elements of Cane's complex narrative architecture. Adopting an ethnomusicological vantage point—one accounting for the text's hybridization of historical human sciences and musical culture qua literary representation—adds dimension to understandings of Cane's use of African American musics as an incisive mode of criticism about trauma, race, and the cultural politics of modernization.

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