The first comprehensive overview of Werner Sollors’ ground-breaking work on culture and ethnicity.
Born in Silesia, raised in the Frankfurt area and educated in Berlin, Werner Sollors has spent most of his career at Harvard University in the United States and is regarded, in Cornel West’s words, ‘as one of the finest scholars that we have on race and cultural hybridity in both this country and the world’. This Reader offers the first comprehensive overview of the work of a central figure in the field of ethnic studies. The pieces collected here range from Puritan New England to contemporary Germany, from ‘Exodus’ to Mary Antin’s Promised Land, from the ‘Curse of Ham’ to Teju Cole. They attest to Sollors’ deep historical sensibilities, his attention to textual detail and his awareness of the costs and opportunities of both cosmopolitan ideals and particularist commitments, whilst addressing a central question: why does modernisation take the form of ethnicisation in many places around the globe?
The collected essays are complemented by a detailed introduction by Daniel G. Williams which foregrounds some of the key emphases and tensions in Sollors’ writings.
Arvustused
Williamss Reader does not provide access to all of Sollorss contributions, but it is an excellent primer. It does all one could ask a volume of 468 pages to do for so capacious a body of scholarly work. No writer of the last half-century has done as much as Werner Sollors to illuminate the history of American diversity. -- David A. Hollinger * Reviews in American History * The Werner Sollors Reader doesnt need posterity to be considered a cultural classic. These are spectacular essays, wide-ranging and shape-shifting. They courageously risk engaging with the most pressing predicaments of literary history and cultural values as they unfold in the everyday of our living and thinking. Sollors has crafted a critical voice of enduring civility to develop a cosmopolitanism of the marginalized and overlooked. At the same time, Sollors celebrates the enormous brilliance and creativity of African Americans in the US and minorities elsewhere. -- Homi Bhabha, Harvard University What this doorstop of an anthology proves is that no matter what topic Sollors turns tothe role of ethnicity in American literature, the benefits of multilingualism, the importance of interracial relationships in American culturethe different strands of his thinking always converge, in a cogent refutation of all exclusionary definitions of Americanness. -- Christoph Irmscher * Harvard Magazine *
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Schwarz, Braun, und Beige:: Towards Cosmopolitan Particularism
Daniel G. Williams
Part I. Terms and Definitions
1. The Invention of Ethnicity
2. Race and Ethnicity
Part II. American Literature
Overviews
3. Between Consent and Descent: Studying Ethnic Literature in the USA
4. Typology and Ethnogenesis
5. Ethnic Modernism
Readings
6. Edward Taylor
7. Mark Twains Puddnhead Wilson
8. Hemingway and American Style
9. Richard Rodriguezs Autobiographical Writing
Part III. African American Literature
Overview
10. The Wright Era: Native Son and the African American Novel
Readings
11. Charles Chesnutts The Marrow of Tradition
12. Adrienne Kennedy and Tragedy
13. Teju Coles Open City and Cosmopolitanism
Part IV. Jewish American Literature
Overview
14. Assimilation and Dissimilation in Jewish American Prose Writing,
1900-1950
Readings
15. Mary Antins The Promised Land
16. Henry Roths Call It Sleep
Part V. Multilingualism
Overview
17. The Blind Spot of Multiculturalism: Americas Invisible Literature
Readings
18. Non-English American Short Stories
19. German-Language Literature about the United States, and German-American
Writing
Part VI. Interracialism
Overview
20. Can Rabbits Have Interracial Sex?
Readings
21. The Curse of Ham
22. Wolfram von Eschenbachs Parzival and Eugene ONeills All Gods Chillun
Got Wings
23. Incest and Miscegenation
Part VII. World War II and after in Germany
Overview
24. Before Success
Readings
25. Better to Die by Them than for Them: Carl Schmitt Reads Benito
Cereno
26. Everybody Gets Fragebogened Sooner or Later: The Denazification
Questionnaire as Cultural Text
27. A Child at Bergen-Belsen: A Photograph from 1945
Index
Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and of African American Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of several volumes on race and ethnicity including Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986), Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (1997) and Ethnic Modernism (2008). Daniel G. Williams is Professor of English Literature at Swansea University and author of Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois (2006), Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales 18451945 (2012) and Wales Unchained: Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century (2015).
