Race and National Identity in Modernist Anthropology and Jean Toomer’s “The Blue Meridian”

Abstract

Jean Toomer’s seldom-discussed long poem “The Blue Meridian,” which he drafted over a long period beginning in the early 1920s, proposes an amalgamation of race and national belonging in the new type of the “American.” Seeing himself as a precursor to this new hybrid, Toomer often polemicized against the limiting logic of race. In proposing such an understanding of race in relation to nation, Toomer drew on the work of anthropologists such as Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Melville J. Herskovits.

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