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

By Werner Sollors

Book Overview

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? Werner Sollors examines these questions and others in Neither Black nor White yet Both, a fully researched investigation of literary works that, in the past, have been read more for a black-white contrast of "either-or" than for an interracial realm of "neither, nor, both, and in-between."

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674607805
• ISBN13: 9780674607804
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 592 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Excellent exploration of mixed-race literature

Excellent exploration of mixed-race literature. This book rescues literature by and about mixed-race (Mulattoes and mixed-whites) people from the myth that they are all exotic varieties of "black." The author also gives us the history of common myths about interracial mixture. This book should be read with Lawrence Tenzer's "The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New Look at the Slavery Issue" because both books emphasize the importance of the "white slave" in abolitionist literature.