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.