Werner Sollors' study of Interracial literature, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, is about to appear in paperback, published by Harvard University Press.

Werner Sollors grew up in a village near Frankfurt, Germany, in the American zone of occupation established after World War II. He remembers going to the Amerikahaus in Frankfurt to watch 1950s documentaries about the wonder that was the United States.

"These films are now camp," Sollors said, laughing. "Women in front of radar ranges; demonstrating how the atom gets split by people playing ping-pong on a train; documentaries on the fantastic prison system in which prisoners get retrained as advanced craftsmen."

But the films, the programs he heard on Armed Forces Radio, the GIs stationed in Frankfurt, and, especially, a black American professor Sollors encountered at university, left deep impressions on him and helped determine the course of his life and scholarship. He has lived in the United States for more than two decades, teaching at Columbia University before coming to Harvard. He is now director of undergraduate studies in the Department of English and American Literature and Language; Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature; professor of Afro-American studies; and chair of the Committee on Higher Degrees in the History of American Civilization.

Sollors is among a small cadre of scholars who specialize in American literature written in languages other than English. It is, he says, a field shrugged at by combatants in the canon wars -- which makes it all the more appealing to him. "There isn't already a whole set of opinions, pro and con," he said, adding that, although he thinks multilingual literature is a discipline waiting to proliferate, his task is to pursue the texts and bibliography and see what happens.

"I can foresee dissertations on multilingual production in Philadelphia in the 18th century or in New Orleans in the 19th century or in New York throughout its history that would put together constellations of authors who knew each other across linguistic and ethnic and national literary divides, and were engaged in forms of interaction that have been ignored," he said.

The definition of what constitutes "American" literature has changed often since Colonial times, Sollors said. But only in the course of this century has it become synonymous with literature written in English. In the earliest anthologies of American writing, editors included Native American stories, Spanish and French colonial texts, Puritan works written in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and those written in English. Mark Twain published a version of his story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," which he'd translated into French and back into English, in the process making fun of both languages. In 1845, a group of Creole-speaking African-American writers published the first anthology of black American literature.

Ironically, Sollors said, the ejection of multilingual literature from serious consideration coincided with the growing acceptance of multicultural writing. "The two are so allied that this seems to me a temporary blindness," he said. "There is a very good argument against excluding either."

People like Omar ibn Said, a highly educated Senegambian who became a slave in the United States and who in 1831 wrote a memoir in Arabic, have unique perspectives. In Said's memoir, written in a language that few people in this country understood, "the generalized attack on slavery in terms of the Protestant abolitionist is missing, but there is a moral critique of a slaveholder who did not perceive [Said] as the kind of person he was," Sollors said. "It's a toned-down version of the typical description of slavery" such as that offered by writers trying to gain the support of New England abolitionist groups. "I have never seen anything like it in the English-language narratives," said Sollors.

At university, Sollors settled on American studies after trying law as well as Russian studies. His interest in out-of-the-mainstream texts was fostered by Charles Nichols, a black American who chaired the American studies department at Freie Universität Berlin, where Sollors was enrolled.

In Nichols, a Brown University Ph.D. who taught at segregated Southern colleges before going to Europe, Sollors found a visionary who, he said, "taught American literature in a utopian, integrated fashion." In a survey course on American poetry, Sollors studied Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown alongside T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Nichols taught stories and novels like Melville's "Benito Cereno" and Twain's The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and, in discussions of Huckleberry Finn, highlighted the portrayal of Jim and the use of the word "nigger."

Odd but appropriate, then, that Sollors should find himself in the middle of the 1965 Watts riots during his first trip to the United States. He had come as an exchange student, and he remembers LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) participating in a panel discussion on the meaning of violence. During the week, Sollors saw a production of two of Jones' plays. "It was closed the next day by the fire department," he said.

The Watts experience, he said, "got me thinking about all kinds of issues. I was startled by the way in which modernist writing could have immediate political meaning in some situations" such as the riots. He ended up writing his dissertation about LeRoi Jones, and his career as an Afro-Americanist began.

Sollors says the same factors that draw him to multilingual literature also drew him to black American and interracial writing. At the time, he says, there was an "enormous bibliography" of black texts that were almost entirely left out of the standard curriculum. Teaching novels such as Richard Wright's Native Son and the works of William Faulkner at Columbia in the '70s, Sollors discovered that his students were extremely receptive to reading and talking about race.

"I loved the discussions that got started around issues that students felt existentially," he said. "A lot of these ethnic issues were very deeply felt. Students were eager for an exchange." And as a German, Sollors had some advantages. For example, he was perceived to be free of the cultural baggage of white Americans. "Students sometimes expect fairness from an outsider, whereas from cultural insiders they may expect a particular record or membership. Unexpected issues may thus be aired in our interactions -- students may have to explain some set arguments they've never had to explain before."

Sollors' comparative study of interracial literature, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, is about to appear in Harvard University Press paperback, and he currently is writing an entry for the Cambridge History of American Literature on American writers from 1900-1950. It includes an examination of minority and multilingual writings in an international context, he said, exploring, for instance, the ways in which European forms of modernism influenced American writing, and vice versa. The field, which Sollors calls "the cross-fertilization of aesthetic patterns," is understudied.

And that, of course, suits him just fine.