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The Werner Sollors ReaderEthnicity, Cosmopolitanism and Particularism

By Werner Sollors and Daniel G. Williams

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About this book

The first comprehensive overview of Werner Sollors’ ground-breaking work on culture and ethnicity

  • Introduces key concepts in ethnic studies, including ‘consent and descent’, ‘ethnic modernism’, ‘interracialism’, ‘assimilationism’, ‘multilingualism’
  • Includes influential readings in American, African-American and Jewish-American Literatures including Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mary Antin’s The Promised Land and Teju Cole’s Open City
  • Presents field-defining essays on the challenge posed by interracialism and multilingualism to homogeneous conceptions of identity

Transnational in scope and comparative in method, the essays open up new avenues for cultural study in the age of Trump, Brexit and identity politics.

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.

Reviews

Williams’s Reader does not provide access to all of Sollors’s 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.
The Werner Sollors Reader doesn’t 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.
What this doorstop of an anthology proves is that no matter what topic Sollors turns to—the role of ethnicity in American literature, the benefits of multilingualism, the importance of interracial relationships in American culture—the different strands of his thinking always converge, in a cogent refutation of all exclusionary definitions of Americanness.
Table of contents

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 Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson
8. Hemingway and American Style
9. Richard Rodriguez’s Autobiographical Writing

Part III. African American Literature
Overview
10. The Wright Era: Native Son and the African American Novel
Readings
11. Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition
12. Adrienne Kennedy and Tragedy
13. Teju Cole’s Open City and Cosmopolitanism

Part IV. Jewish American Literature
Overview
14. Assimilation and Dissimilation in Jewish American Prose Writing, 1900-1950
Readings
15. Mary Antin’s The Promised Land
16. Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep

Part V. Multilingualism
Overview
17. The Blind Spot of Multiculturalism: America’s 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 Eschenbach’s Parzival and Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s 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

About the contributors

Werner Sollors

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

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 1845–1945 (2012) and Wales Unchained: Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century (2015).