Werner Sollors' Beyond Ethnicity and Afro-American Literature

Abstract

Beyond Ethnicity is massive and useful book that contains so much that it can be interpreted in number of ways. It is also careful and moderate, making it risky book to try to summarize. Some points, however, stand out. Sollors prizes the between extremes, as his Aristotelian Table for the Ethics of Wholesome Provincialism (190) indicates. This table lists various Sphere[s] of Action or Feeling, along with words designating the mean and of these spheres. Thus for the sphere group, ethnocentrism is the excess, deracination is the deficiency, and proper ethnicity is the mean. For the sphere of region, sectionalism is the excess, mobility is the deficiency and regionalism is the mean, and so on for twelve other spheres. While Sollors does not say directly that these means are normative, he reserves his rare anger for those who make absolute or extreme statements, notably for those who defend what he (Sollors) calls biological insiderism (13), for he insists, a French surname doesn't make me an expert on Beaujolais (13). Practicing what he preaches, Sollors rarely makes absolute or extreme statements himself. Taking due note of the subtlety of his positions, I shall comment on certain shortcomings in Sollors' treatment of Afro-American and show that these shortcomings stem from his critical perspective. First, while Sollors makes it clear that Afro-American is ethnic that race is merely one aspect of ethnicity (36) he does little more than mention many of the major works of AfroAmerican literature. To be sure, the strength of Sollors' work is that he develops broad sense of what literature is and that he draws connections between well-known and little-known (or little-discussed) works, from Indian plays to Zangwill's The Melting Pot and obscure works with melting pot themes. A critic trying to move beyond ethnicity, though, is obligated to consider works which might challenge his or her position. But Richard Wright is mentioned first in critique of as social evidence (9), with later comments on Native Son (53) hardly touching on