Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature - Rilegato

Sollors, Werner

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 019505282X ISBN 13: 9780195052824

Casa editrice: OUP USA, 1998

Riassunto

Why can a "white" woman give birth to a "black" baby, while a "black" woman can never give birth to a "white" baby in the United States? What makes racial "passing" so different from social mobility? Why are interracial and incestuous relations often confused or conflated in literature, making "miscegenation" appear as if it were incest? When did the myth that one can tell a person's race by the moon on their fingernails originate? How did blackness get associated with "the curse of Ham" when the Biblical text makes no reference to skin colour at all?
Werner Sollors examines these questions and others in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, a new and exhaustively researched exploration of "interracial literature". In the past, interracial texts have been read more for a black-white contrast of "either-or" than for an interracial realm of "neither, nor, both, and in-between". Intermarriage prohibitions have been legislated throughout the modern period and were still in the law books in the 1980s. Stories of black-white sexual and family relations have thus run against powerful social taboos. Yet much interracial literature has been written, and this book suggests its pervasiveness and offers new comparative and historical contexts for understanding it.
Looking at authors from Heliodorus, John Stedman, Buffon, Thomas Jefferson, Heinrich von Kleist, Victor Hugo, Aleksandr Sergeevic Puskin, and Hans Christian Andersen, to Lydia Marie Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Cirilo Villaverde, Aluisio Azevedo, and Pauline Hopkins, and on to modern writers such as Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Boris Vian, and William Faulkner, Sollors ranges across time, space, and cultures, analysing scientific and legal works as well as poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, to explore the many themes and motifs interwoven throughout interracial literature. From the etymological origins of the term "race" to the cultural sources of the "Tragic Mulatto," Sollors examines the recurrent images and ideas in this literature of love, family, and other relations between blacks, whites, and those of "mixed race."
Sollors's interdisciplinary explorations of literary themes yield many insights into the history and politics of "race," and illuminate a new understanding of the relations between cultures through the focus on interracial exchanges. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both is vital reading for anyone who seeks to understand what has been written and said about "race," and where interracial relations can go from here.

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Recensione:

Sollor's wide learning establishes vast historical and international contexts for his subject ... its value for future scholarship in a variety of fields is beyond question. (Henry B Wonham, Comparative Literature Vol 51 no 3 Summer 1999)

Among scholars working in the area of 'ethnic' literatures, Werner Sollers deservedly enjoys considerable respect and critical acclaim... Thematic Explorations in Interracial Literature is essential reading for Americanists everywhere. It is a model of theoretical sophistication and methodological rigor, and will definitely serve as the chief basis for future studies in this vast and hitherto uncharted area. - Susan Castillo, University of Glasgow (REVIEW NOT LABELLED WITH JOURNAL!)

"Werner Sollors, who has shaped much of the current scholarly discourse on ethnicity and literature, has again opened a whole new territory for inspection in this book: the topic of interracial relationships in literature, a fascinating, forbidding, often suppressed, and indeed little researched topic. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both is a landmark that bears testimony to the rich and provocative tradition of miscegenation in art and literature. Sollors offers both a plethora of intriguing thematic explorations from Shakespeare to Kleist and Faulkner, and a cultural history of censorship on interracial literature. He is a masterful guide through this thorny, yet infatuating territory."―Frank Trommler, Professor of German & Comparitive Literature, University of Pennsylvania

This text's strength lies in its eclecticism: it draws on a variety of religious and ancient source texts - and ranges across continents. A thesis that is informed and informative. His intricate readings of myths and stories, like that of Inkle and Yarico, are fascinating. This is an important contribution to scholarship in racial and cultural studies. - Sharon Monteith in American Studies, Vol.33 No.1 1999.

L'autore:

L Werner Sollors is the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and of Afro American Studies at Harvard University. Previous works include Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist Modernism" and Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: OUP USA
• Data di pubblicazione: 1998
• ISBN 10: 019505282X
• ISBN 13: 9780195052824
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 592