Toward a "faceless deity": Jean Toomer and "The Blue Meridian" as transreligious utopia

Much scholarly attention has been directed to biracial writer Jean Toomer’s 1923 novel Cane, particularly his transgressive approach to racial identity amid early 20th-century racial purification projects. To contend with his competing identities, Stephanie Hawkins argues that Toomer adopts a philosophy of transracialism in which racial identity becomes legible only through its transgression. Yet Toomer’s transgressive approach to race encompasses political categories like gender, nation, and, as I explore in this paper, religion. Despite extensive critical engagement with Cane, much less attention has been paid to Toomer’s post-Cane writings, which reckon with religious identity and ultimately culminate in his final published poem, “The Blue Meridian” (1936). In the poem, Toomer suggests that racial unification is only possible through religious unification, and it is only in tandem that the emergence of the “new America” Toomer envisions is possible. In this paper, I extend Hawkins’s notion of transracialism into the religious sphere to argue that Toomer articulates an ontologically complex, politically subversive, and only recently defined sense of transreligiosity. Drawing on Anastasios Panagiotopoulos and Eugenia Roussou’s 2019 concept of transreligiosity — defined as a deterritorialized religious orientation shaped by global networks — I situate Toomer’s evolving spirituality within the broader context of 20th-century cross-cultural religious exchange. In my close reading of "The Blue Meridian," I argue that Toomer constructs a “New Order of Religion” to dissolve religious boundaries and connect his established transracialism to a unified politics of transgression and create a foundation for political life. This politics, I argue, serves to disrupt entrenched political categorizations, like race, nationality, and religion, and lays the foundation for a utopian world. In doing so, I aim to animate Toomer’s utopia through a coherent, even if idealistic, political framework and give voice to his post-Cane work. While acknowledging the contradictions and limitations of his vision, I explore its broader implications for contemporary discussions on race, religion, and identity.