Lea Borenstein. “Liminal Landscapes: Recuperating the Human Form and National Identity in Jean Toomer’s Cane”
The idea of nation is often closely tied to metaphors of land and cultivation, with the growth of plant life standing metonymically for cultural identification born of a national sense of place. While nationalism is predominantly understood as a negative force associated with imperialism, it has also come to stand for the revolutionary movements of the subaltern in striving for political, social, and cultural recognition. In the case of black America, this process is especially complex as nationalism is a two-way process in which the violently suppressed ancient identity of Africa must be integrated with an allegiance to Americanism, itself contradictory and exclusionary to black identity. No physical landscape in this nation better signifies this complex history than the South. Jean Toomer, with his 1923 novel Cane, reckoned with this complex history and its psycho-social implications as he portrayed migration from the South between the end of slavery and the Harlem Renaissance. He wrestles with the negative associations with land formed during the time of slavery, a loss of a positive relationship with nature that was essential to a previously African identity, as a kind of trauma that in need of healing. Toomer expresses a desire for recuperation of the Southern landscape in black consciousness in episodes involving sexual desire, especially of the female body being closely associated with the natural world. An unmediated connection between the female body and the land in many of the scenes set in the South in the collection give way to more fraught episodes in those poems and vignettes set in the North. The industrial and urban landscape of this latter setting interrupts and frustrates the process of recuperation mentioned above. Ultimately, the boundary between nature and culture is constantly reinforced, instead of being collapsed as would be necessary for a fully integrated reckoning with a new national landscape for this displaced population, which results in a fragmented relationship with the newly imagined nation.
Brian Eberle. “Promise and Precarity: Movement through Space in Upton Sinclair’s OIL!”
While Upton Sinclair’s OIL! has never been lauded as a typically “Californian” novel in the same way that works by other authors such as Frank Norris or John Steinbeck have been, Sinclair’s work nevertheless provides extended descriptions of California’s geography that play a clear role in the shaping both its characters and events. Critical analysis of the novel’s depictions of landscape often engage with the precarity of the State’s natural geography (earthquakes, erosion, fire-danger) and interpret it as a comment on the precarious nature of the extractive capitalism that drives the action of the plot. However, these analyses ignore or understate the promise presented by the novel’s more Edenic tropes (natural beauty, agricultural abundance, new ways of living). My paper seeks to highlight and recover these tropes and present a more nuanced understanding of the role that the California landscape plays in OIL! by reading the novel’s depictions of geography through Michel de Certeau’s distinction between “place” and “space.” First, I will examine the ways that the novel establishes “places” as static examples of landscape that can be mapped, controlled, and sold as real estate and sites of (oil) extraction. Then, I will analyze how the novel’s depictions of “space,” characterized by complexity and movement, are facilitated by perspective of the novel’s protagonist and his motor car, which provide an alternative lens through which to view the landscape. I argue that the movement of the car invites a comparison of maps and mapped spaces, which often exhibit a disciplinary control of knowledge, with the real-life spaces they purport to represent. My close reading of this comparison will stress the ways that the car’s motion reveals and challenges the degree to which the Californian landscape can be defined solely by capitalism and the oil industry and, instead, presents an altered, hopeful perspective through which readers can view the State.
