Böcker av Werner Sollors

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

Some of the most original thinkers explain popular theories of ethnicity--pluralism, migration, transnationalism, etc.--in one concise volume From the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia to debates over multiculturalism, ethnicity has, once again, become a global preoccupation. But what exactly do we mean when we speak of ethnicity? And when and how did ethnicity become such an important area of cultural expression and identification that people are ready to die and to kill for it? Gathering the work of some of our most original thinkers, Theories of Ethnicity provides, in one convenient volume, the most probing and frequently cited considerations of such topics as the melting pot and pluralism, race and race problems, migration and marginality, assimilation and transnationalism, intermarriage, kinship and religion, boundary-construction and maintenance, and the important role of power relations for ethnicity. Contributors include such intellects as Max Weber, Carl Gustav Jung, Margaret Mead, Georg Simmel, Erik Erikson, Karl Mannheim, Fredrik Barth, and Herbert Gans. Theories of Ethnicity grounds much current sociological, cultural, and political research on ethnicity in a theoretical foundation that has heretofore been lacking, providing an important historical base for ongoing and future work on this timely subject.

What unites and what divides Americans as a nation? Who are Americans, and can they strike a balance between an emphasis on divergent ethnic origins and what they have in common? Opening with a survey of American literature through the vantage point of ethnicity, Werner Sollors examines Americans evolving understanding of themselves and the key role writing has played in that process.

In Germany the end of World War II calls forth images of obliterated cities, hungry refugees, and ghostly monuments to Nazi crimes. Drawing on diaries, photographs, essays, reports, fiction and film, Werner Sollors makes visceral the sorrow and anger, guilt and pride, despondency and resilience of a defeated people--and the paradoxes of occupation.

From the origins of the term "race" to the cultural sources of the "Tragic Mulatto," and from the calculus of color to the retellings of various plots, Sollors examines what we know about race, analyzing recurrent motifs in scientific and legal works as well as in fiction, drama, and poetry.

In the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. moved to the center of global cultural production. How did African American, European immigrant, and other minority writers take part in these transformative developments? This book attempts to address this question in a series of close readings of major texts from this period.