ABSTRACT
In Jean Toomer’s essayistic writing on race, most of which remained unpublished during his life, miscegenation is a highly valued and celebrated aspect of American culture.2 Toomer knew, however, that due to the insufficiency of contemporary race categories based on the either-or logic of a color line, he could not simply celebrate miscegenation without introducing the demand for a new discourse that would sufficiently represent people, like himself, of mixed race and ethnicity.3 Toomer called this new racial category the “American race” and fashioned himself one of its first articulate members. One of Toomer’s aims in these essays, then, is to take part in the process of racial formation, defined by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.”4 If we consider Toomer’s essays on race in light of Omi and Winant’s racial formation theory, Toomer’s project to discursively create a new racial subject is also an attempt to “redefin[e] the meaning of racial identity, and consequently of race itself, in American society.”5
