By
– August 29, 2011
For the past thirty years or so, cultural studies have tended to emphasize difference rather than identity. Such a focus has led to divisive identity politics that cannot comprehend the richness of the dialogue that developed among many groups because of the fertile common ground on which each stood. In this fascinating and persuasive study, Bornstein, the C.A Patrides Professor of Literature, Emeritus, at the University of Michigan, demonstrates that over the 100-year period between 1845 and 1945, the cooperative sympathies among Blacks, Jews, and Irish were deeply rooted and strong and that these areas of cooperation overshadowed the real differences and tensions that existed among these groups.
Ranging over a wide array of materials from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and James Joyce’s Ulysses to Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, the film The Jazz Singer, and the speeches of Frederick Douglass, Bornstein allows the individuals involved to speak for themselves. His project recovers a broad and historical record of what Blacks, Jews, and Irish themselves said and did rather than imagining their reactions and then projecting them from the present back to the past. Thus, he explores, among other examples, the deliberate invocation of the Irish Renaissance of W.B. Yeats and John Synge as a model for the Harlem Renaissance of Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson, the support of Pan– African liberation movements for Jewish ones, and the publication by the same largely new and Jewish New York publishing houses of the literature
of all three groups. Bornstein’s brilliant comparative and transatlantic study compels us to rethink the relationship among races and the ways that we can learn from the examples he discusses in such luminous detail.
Ranging over a wide array of materials from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and James Joyce’s Ulysses to Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, the film The Jazz Singer, and the speeches of Frederick Douglass, Bornstein allows the individuals involved to speak for themselves. His project recovers a broad and historical record of what Blacks, Jews, and Irish themselves said and did rather than imagining their reactions and then projecting them from the present back to the past. Thus, he explores, among other examples, the deliberate invocation of the Irish Renaissance of W.B. Yeats and John Synge as a model for the Harlem Renaissance of Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson, the support of Pan– African liberation movements for Jewish ones, and the publication by the same largely new and Jewish New York publishing houses of the literature
of all three groups. Bornstein’s brilliant comparative and transatlantic study compels us to rethink the relationship among races and the ways that we can learn from the examples he discusses in such luminous detail.
Henry L. Carrigan, Jr. writes about books for Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, BookPage, and ForeWord. He has written for numerous newspapers including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Charlotte Observer, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Orlando Sentinel, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Washington Post Book World.
