WK13-DQ

Ethnicity
A.) Sollors in his essay attempts to define “ethnicity.” He says “it refers to not a thing-in-itself but to a relationship: ethnicity is typically based on a //contrast//” (288). Then he claims “Race, in current American usage, sometimes perceived to be more intense, objective, or real than ethnicity” (289).


 * Since the definition of “ethnicity” is ambiguous to many, how would you interpret Sollors’ basic definition of ethnicity in relation to multiple literary theories and discourse? What would you add or modify?
 * Is “race” a better term than “ethnicity”, or less or equally the same? Explain your answer.

--Mona

B.) Sollors says that “…comparative approaches could help to deepen our understanding of the boundary-defiance of the literary tradition…” (303).
 * If ethnicity helps in “examining great text on a comparative basis,” how do you explain the relationship between ethnicity and literary works? Is their relationship interchangeable? Can each be considered as an approach towards deepening readers' understanding of the other?

--Asmaa


 * Race **

__A.)__ “In a world whose politics were so dominated by racialism, it is hardly surprising that races became a central literary theme. What is, perhaps, more puzzling is the fact that many of those works that have been central to our understanding of what literature is are also thematically preoccupied with racial issues” (282).


 * Still, with the increasingly awareness over racism nowadays, what if a famous contemporary author wrote a work similar to Shakespeare’s //The Merchant of Venice //, will it be as successful or at least as acceptable as Shakespeare’s?

--Sultan

__B.)__ Appiah links the emergence of the concept of nationalism to the imaginative recreation of a common “cultural past that was … crafted into a shared tradition by literary scholars” (284).


 * Considering the political, literary & scientific involvement in the process of nation-building, can you speculate on the future of “marginalized” nations in regard to their efforts towards restoring a better standing? Which, do you think, would bear more significance: recreating already recreated pasts //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 16px;">or //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 16px;"> inventing nonexistent futures?

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 16px;">--Ali