The Werner Sollors Reader

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. -- David A. Hollinger * Reviews in American History *
The selections in The Werner Sollors Reader both demonstrate how historicized conceptual understanding in ethnic studies might be conducted, and reveal the limits and dangers of stereotypical and generalized uses of their core terminology. [The Reader encourages us] to ask the ways in which the scholarship of Sollors on race and ethnicity provides a perspective on current efforts by the US government to change the narrative about race at institutions such as Harvard University by executive order and legislative edict. In view of this, Williams's anthology of Sollors on the construction of race and ethnicity in American literary history takes on an entirely new significance because it has the potential to provide us with a vibrant model of how to approach and discuss the increasing racism and fascism on display in MAGA America. -- Jeffrey R. Di Leo * Revue française d’études américaines *
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. -- Homi Bhabha, Harvard University
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. -- Christoph Irmscher * Harvard Magazine *