Werner Sollors

Interracialism : Black-white intermarriage in American history, literature, and law

Interracialism, or marriage between members of different races, has formed, torn apart, defined and divided the American nation since its earliest history. This volume explores the primary texts of interracialism as a means of addressing core issues in American racial identity. Ranging from Hannah Arendt to George Schuyler and from Pace v. Alabama to Loving v. Virginia, it provides extraordinary resources for faculty and students in English, American and Ethnic Studies, as well as for general readers interested in race relations.

Ethnic Groups/Ethnicity: Historical Aspects

Historical aspects of ethnic groups and ethnicity include the origins of the terms most frequently used in the field of ethnic studies (such as ‘race,’ ‘racism,’ ‘genocide,’ ‘ethnicity,’ ‘ethnic,’ ‘ethnic group,’ and ‘identity’) as well as the conceptual approaches that have been advanced by scholars starting with Max Weber and Georg Simmel. It is with this vocabulary and with concepts ranging from the ‘ethnic group’ to ‘marginality’ that an impressive body of scholarly literature has been produced by the end of the twentieth century.

What might take the place of late-generation European American ethnicity?

As Herbert J. Gans writes, ethnicity among fourth-, fifth- and later-generation descendants of European immigrants (LGEs) may be disappearing, and studies of LGEs should be undertaken along the lines that he proposes. LGE nostalgia for pasts that may never have existed and LGE intermarriage rates with non-whites as well as the ideology of multiculturalism, the easy availability of travel and communication, and the proliferation of dual citizenship might provide further contexts for such studies. In some cases, might the darkness of ethnicity precede a new dawn of transnational cultural and culinary practices, adopted from real or putative countries of origin?

Cooperation between English and Foreign Languages in the Area of Multilingual Literature

1 The notion that the world is becoming English-speaking is misleading. The world is becoming increasingly bilingual, with English as a lingua franca, not a native tongue. Moreover, even as English spreads, it behaves as any lingua franca does-it is breaking apart into local hybrids unintelligible to one another, like Taglish in the Philippines and Singlish in Singapore. The future of English, like that of any lingua

Holocaust and Hiroshima: American Ethnic Prose Writers Face the Extreme

This essay originated as a presentation in the session devoted to this special topic at the 2001 MLA convention.

Obligations to Negroes who would be kin if they were not Negro

The 1965/1966 Dcedalus issues on “The Negro American” reveal how Americas racial future was imagined nearly a half-century ago, and at least one of the prophecies - voiced by sociologist Everett C. Hughes - found its fulfillment in an unexpected way at President Obamas inauguration in 2009. Short stories by Amina Gautier (“Been Meaning to Say” and “Pan is Dead”), Heidi Durrows novel The Girl WhoFellfrom the Sky, plays by Thomas Bradshaw (Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist and Cleansed), and poems by Terrance Hayes (“For Brothers and the Dragon” and “The Avocado”) suggest trends in recent works by African American authors who began their publishing careers in the twenty-first century.

The Celtic Nations and the African Americas

Daniel Williams has put together an extraordinarily interesting collection of essays on cultural interactions — mergers and antagonisms — between Celtic, AfricanAmerican, and Afro-Caribbean identities. In presenting fresh archival work and new close readings, the essays are also attentive issues of linguistic and racial difference and to changing theories of belonging. Michael Newton offers the first full examination of Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlanders and black Americans in the US, pursuing especially leads toward the presence of black speakers of Gaelic, thus opening a theoretical discussion about the significance race and language in notions of group membership and about alternative models of assimilation. He is right in assuming that the anecdote he begins with and returns to at the end was common among other immigrant groups as well: thus Die Emigranten, a play published in German in St Louis in 1882, included the following scene:

Region, Ethnic Group, and American Writers: From “Non-Southern” and “Non-Ethnic” to Ludwig Lewisohn; or the Ethics of Wholesome Provincialism

In 1785 a writer who used the pen name “Celadon” (singer) tried to clarify the meaning of regions in America by making them one with ethnic groups. The author of the small pamphlet The Golden Age; or, Future Glory of North-America Discovered by an Angel to Celadon in Several Entertaining Visions contemplated the future of America from a mountain overlooking the whole continent. He describes himself in a state of rapture when the Angel recalled my attention by a gentle touch on my side, and pointing his finger a little to the south-west, Celadon, says he, do you see yonder long valley. … That whole region you may call Savagenia: It being designed for the future habitation of your now troublesome Indians. — And that other valley. … It lies toward the north-west … This you may call Nigrania: It being allotted for the Negroes to dwell there, when the term of their vassalage is come to a period. — And in all those vast spaces westward to the great ocean, there may be seats hereafter for sundry foreign nations. — There may be a French, a Spanish, a Dutch, an Irish, an English, &c. yea, a Jewish State here in process of time. — And all of them united in brotherly affection, will at last form the most potent empire on the face of the earth (pp. 11–12).

The Rebirth of All Americans in the Great American Melting Pot : Notes Toward the Vindication of a Rejected Popular Symbol; or: An Ethnic Variety of a Religious Experience

When it comes to discussions about the term “melting pot” our minds seem to be made up. “The point about the melting pot…is that it did not happen,” Glazer and Moynihan conclude in their widely read study, significantly entitled Beyond the Melting Pot (1963). Michael Novaks book with the equally telling title The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972) agrees that the melting pot “did not exist,” although “meltingpot ideology” according to Novak “has dominated the social sciences for three decades.” Yet, as Philip Gleason has demonstrated, the term “melting-pot” has been met with rebuttals by conservatives and liberals alike, from the time it was popularized by Israel Zangwills play The Melting-Pot (1908) to the present. Poetic advocates and sociological opponents of the term, however, shared a certain vagueness in defining the meaning of “melting pot” while embellishing and elaborating the imagery. Attempts to interpret the image in strict social terms range from “Americanization of newcomers” to “constant change and regeneration of Americans through ethnic interaction and/or intermarriage.” Isaac Berkson, Edward Saveth, Milton Gordon, and Andrew Greeley have drawn up elaborate models that distinguish the melting pot “concept” from such alternatives as “Americanization,” “Anglo-Conformity,” “Federation of Nationalities,” or “Cultural Pluralism.” Of course, the meaning of the image has also changed historically from the idealistic concern with an American national identity at the time of the American Revolution to the different practical versions of the melting pot during the period of the New Immigration. Apparently, the opposition to the melting pot is at least as old as the notion itself, and includes such luminaries as Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin. In 1785, for example, three years after Crevecoeur first evoked the melting imagery in defining an American national character, a pseudonymous “Celadon”s The Golden Age: or Future Glory of North-America mapped out the future United States as a confederation of nation-states and specifically listed “Nigrania” and “Savagenia”—a black and an Indian state—in the Southwest as well as the establishment of “a French, a Spanish, a Dutch, an Irish, &c. yea, a Jewish state.”