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.

• Watch Werner Sollors in conversation with Daniel G. Williams
• Explore the review piece in Harvard Magazine