The Werner Sollors Reader: Ethnicity, Cosmopolitanism and Particularism

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.

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

Review :
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.