“The Black Body in Nature” considers writers who, in their critical and imaginative work, map the contours of an African American nature writing tradition. In this environmental canon, authors persistently attend to the violence associated with the outdoors, lurking in forests, woods, and other secluded areas.These geographies, while environmentally rich, can be threatening spaces, isolated and hostile.Yet, as the story of birder Christian Cooper attests, menacing areas needn’t always be sheltered, but are manifest in city streets, urban parks, and brightly lit neighborhoods. The African American environmental tradition is nuanced and, as such, the experience of danger and disenfranchisement is counterpointed by an equally strong and persistent affiliation with the natural world that offers, for some, a measure of relief from structural forms of oppression.Situated at the nexus of race and ecocritical thought, this chapter considers the complicated positionality of the Black body in nature through the lens of exile and belonging.

Young’s “African American Magazine Modernism” argues that it is important to recognize the extent to which African American writers and artists appeared in a wide range of magazines in the 1920s. This chapter examines moments of cross-cultural interaction, including such examples as the pieces of Jean Toomer’s Cane distributed across race-conscious, avant-garde, and regional magazines (1922-23); Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” in the pacifist-socialist journal The World Tomorrow (1928); and the infamous case of Nella Larsen’s “Sanctuary” in Century Magazine (1930). Reading African American modernism across these disparate bibliographical environments yields not an easily coherent picture but what John Bryant terms the “muddy materiality” of textual history.

This chapter analyzes the early history of New York’s Harlem, from its Dutch beginnings to its status as an iconic symbol of Black urban modernity in the 1920s. Drawing upon the biographies of W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, and George S. Schuyler, and with references to Marcus Garvey, the chapter details the links between Harlem as a Dutch location and its locale as a “Negro Mecca.” It highlights some of the surprising ways in which Harlem Renaissance figures claimed a biographical connection to Dutch New York to illustrate “the Dutch strain in the ancestry of key Harlem Renaissance figures.” The essay focuses on how, in the 1920s, New Negro intellectuals, especially Du Bois, Schuyler, and Toomer, explored what it meant to incorporate Dutchness in their genealogical self-fashioning, and how Marcus Garvey exploited Holland Society-style stagecraft in his rise to power.

Conceptualizing “black space” as both human and spatial geographies enables a linkage of New Negro modernism and southern realities, a linkage that in turn foregrounds the importance of the American South in the making of the literary and cultural production of the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance. The American South contributed literally and figuratively to the burgeoning critical and cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro Movement, and not merely in terms of contemporary writers and artists of southern birth but especially in terms of historical customs, traditions, and practices of racial segregation, discrimination, and trauma underpinning the modern race writing appearing in magazines, journals, and newspapers during the 1920s.

Alain Locke located the New Negro movement within the context of minority nationalisms. The tendency to view nationalism as an ideology based on notions of purity and segregation has resulted in a mis-reading of the cultural politics of minority nationalisms, whether in Harlem or Dublin. A significant strain of black cultural nationalism has emphasized the internal diversity of African American culture. In close readings of works by Duke Ellington, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston this chapter foregrounds the ways in which the artists of the Harlem Renaissance sought to explore and emphasize the inner diversity of black culture. This emphasis on the hybridity of a minority culture is a characteristic of minority nationalist movements. It is significant in that it poses a challenge to the homogenizing gaze of the dominant culture, and continues to challenge the terms in which nationalism is rejected in much contemporary progressive thought.

For many of Harlem’s New Negro writers, friendships with whites provided invaluable access to publishers, patrons, financial opportunities, and social power. Yet these interracial relationships also required artists to navigate whites’ racially limited expectations about black identity, expression, and behavior. Jean Toomer’s friendship with Waldo Frank, for example, led to an aesthetically productive but racially problematic collaboration. Frank and Toomer provided each other with practical and emotional support as they developed their 1923 novels, Toomer’s Cane and Frank’s Holiday, and the creative implications of their racial difference are complex, particularly because Frank delivered Cane’s manuscript to Horace Liveright, and he advocated for its publication. Likewise, Carl Van Vechten’s friendship with Nella Larsen offered the latter a sense of community and practical support as she wrote Quicksand and Passing, novels whose publication Van Vechten also encouraged with his friend Alfred A. Knopf. New Negro writers navigated the power dynamics of these friendships with skill, nuance, and resilience.

This chapter focuses on the career of Jean Toomer. It looks first at Toomer’s Washington upbringing among the black bourgeoisie, his course of reading in modern literature and the attraction for Toomer of the Greenwich Village literary world he associated with an “aristocracy of culture.” It then examines the way Toomer, following the advice of his friend Waldo Frank, capitalized on his African American identity and experience in the South in writing his first book Cane, which he retrospectively thought of as his “passport” into the literary world. The chapter goes on to demonstrate the extent to which Cane became a burden for Toomer, as it came to define him as a “Negro writer” despite the more ambitious, post-racial works he was writing, none of which could get published. It focuses finally on the reasons why African American anthologists and critics needed to claim Cane for African American literature – in good part, the chapter argues, because it showcased the race’s capacity for modernist experimentation. And it deals finally with Toomer’s reluctant agreement to be anthologized as an African American writer, as this ensured that his writing would endure.