"Like a Living Plant": Modernizations of Rootwork in Cane and Passing

abstract: This article reads transplantation motifs in Jean Toomer's Cane and Nella Larsen's Passing as modernizations of rootwork. While scholarship typically reads the Harlem Renaissance's transplantation metaphors as representations of pastoral longing, these motifs' relationship to traditional botanical healing practices has gone unacknowledged. This article argues that representations of New Negro migrants as uprooted botanical specimens excise the relational logic of rootwork from the fixity of the plantation and repurpose it to suit an emerging context of mobility as the race transplanted into new environments during the Great Migration. Ultimately, New Negro modernizations of rootwork construct a socio-relational logic that positions social ties at the core of Black health.