Challenges of Diversity

Essays on America

By Werner Sollors

Rutgers University Press

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

Challenges of Diversity contains stories of American myths of arrival (pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, slave ships at Jamestown, steerage passengers at Ellis Island), the powerful rhetoric of egalitarian promise in the Declaration of Independence and the heterogeneous ends to which it has been put, and the recurring tropes of multiculturalism over time (e pluribus unum, melting pot, cultural pluralism). Sollors suggests that although the transformation of this settler country into a polyethnic and self-consciously multicultural nation may appear as a story of great progress toward the fulfillment of egalitarian ideals, deepening economic inequality actually exacerbates the divisions among Americans today.

Sollors is an epochal figure in his field, an inventive and risk-taking thinker who is expanding the scope of African American and American scholarship. Tom Socca, Boston Phoenix

Werner Sollors is a highly sophisticated and discerning commentator on the cluster of issues that Americans associate with the word diversity. The essays collected here are among his finest.' David Hollinger, coeditor of The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourcebook

A thoroughly thoughtful and thought-provoking read from beginning to end, Challenges of Diversity: Essays on America is an inherently engaging, impressively informed and informative, exceptionally well reasoned, written, and organized work of original scholarship that is unreserved recommended for both community and academic library collections.’
Midwest Book Review

Sollors is an epochal figure in his field, an inventive and risk-taking thinker who is expanding the scope of African American and American scholarship. Tom Socca, Boston Phoenix

Werner Sollors is a highly sophisticated and discerning commentator on the cluster of issues that Americans associate with the word diversity. The essays collected here are among his finest.' David Hollinger, coeditor of The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourcebook

A thoroughly thoughtful and thought-provoking read from beginning to end, Challenges of Diversity: Essays on America is an inherently engaging, impressively informed and informative, exceptionally well reasoned, written, and organized work of original scholarship that is unreserved recommended for both community and academic library collections.’
Midwest Book Review

WERNER SOLLORS is a research professor of English at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a professor of global literature at New York University Abu Dhabi, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of several books including Beyond Ethnicity and Neither Black nor White yet Both.

Introduction 3
1 Literature and Ethnicity 19
2 National Identity and Ethnic Diversity 67
3 Dedicated to a Proposition 95
4 A Critique of Pure Pluralism 121
5 The Multiculturalism Debate as Cultural Text 145
Notes 177
Acknowledgments 205
Index 207

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