The Origin of Others

By Toni Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates

America’s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?

Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines. Readers of Morrison’s fiction will welcome her discussions of some of her most celebrated books—Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy.

If we learn racism by example, then literature plays an important part in the history of race in America, both negatively and positively. Morrison writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood. She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative. Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Morrison’s most personal work of nonfiction to date.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Release date: Sep 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9780674983120

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) was a Nobel Prize–winning American author, editor, and professor. Her contributions to the modern canon are numerous. Some of her acclaimed titles include: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. She won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Reviews for The Origin of Others

[benjo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very strong and illuminating, on the importance of literature for challenging our misconceptions of otherness.

[judygibson-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of our greatest living writers talks bluntly about the themes she has worked on her entire life: how we divide humanity into Us and Them, whether racism, fear of foreigners, women, the Other.

I thought that at just over a hundred pages this would be a fairly quick read. But no. It's very densely written, digging thoughtfully into important subjects. Every sentence needs to be turned over and over in the mind to extract some juice. I'm going to have to read it again, I think.

[jreynolds1959 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What a brilliant woman! What a shame that she even has to write about "Otherness". Absolute pleasure to read about her decisions about writing her novels and the avenues that she took with them.

[debbiesbooknook · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My Takeaway

“How does one become a racist, a sexist? Since no one is born a racist and there is no fetal predisposition to sexism, one learns Othering not by lecture or instruction but by example.”
Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others

What is race and why does it matter? What triggers in humans the tendency to construct Others? In The Origin of Others, Morrison uses history and literature to illustrate how race is perceived, internalized and conveyed (culturally). Additionally, the book's introduction by Ta-Nehisi Coates is beyond exceptional! Coates points out why this book is so important -- especially right now. In today's challenging (political) world, this is a must read that only a writer as eloquent and powerful as Morrison is able to deliver.

[kaulsu · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This not a novel.It is not even, strictly speaking, a non-fiction book. It is an attempt to tie together six descrete lectures given by Morrison at Harvard in 2016. The Norton Lectures have hosted both some famous and some obscure members of the class of “belle letters.”Morrison was invited to speak, according to Ta-Nehisi Coates, on the “literature of belonging.” I have been made aware these last few years, that I cannot help but view the world from a position of white privilege. Morrison points out that every person views the world from their unique position—of privilege, yes, but privilege takes on its own hue depending on the lenses through which we view it. This is a slim volume, indeed, but what a good thing since I suspect I will get something different from it each time I read it.

[lycomayflower · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Wrrr. This is a series of essays developed from a series of lectures Morrison delivered at Harvard last year. *drums fingers* And Iiiii *glances around furtively* found it really underwhelming? I feel like I *have* to be missing something--I mean, it's *Toni Morrison*--but so many of the essays felt not cohesive. Most of them contained insightful statements about belonging in literature and/or interesting and enlightening and disturbing information about history, but I was left wondering what the conclusion was for most of them too. Possibly the lectures didn't translate well to essay form (I think most things designed to be spoken rather than read work better when they *are* spoken)? Possibly I didn't pay close enough attention? The book has been out for almost three weeks and it is very slim (people have had time, is what I'm saying), and there's almost no chatter about it--few reviews on LT, amazon, or Goodreads, and I don't find any professional reviews either. I'm perplexed.