“When the sun goes down”: Time, space, and genre in Cane and Crossing the River

Abstract

ABSTRACTJean Toomer’s Cane (1923) and Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1993) both negotiate community and individuality in the Black diaspora, utilizing multi-generic techniques. The lack of significant scholarly attention to relationships between the two texts I take as representative of the limiting imagined borders of “national” literature and turn to genre theory to read depictions of Black time, place, and community “in the wake” of the Middle Passage in these works, following Christina Sharpe. I analyze their temporal (de)construction of narrative, employing Wai Chee Dimock’s work in genre theory to read their mix of lyric and narrative modes and Peter Hitchcock’s “long space” to read the “collapsed” long space of the transnational diasporic experience in these experimental texts. Toomer and Phillips work to undermine and expand this space, breaking linear time and historicity as they search for community and selfhood in the traumatic landscape of forced removal from home.