As a longtime fan of Morrison’s work, I was content to reread her novels whenever I felt nostalgic for her nuanced portrayals of African-American life. This being said, “The Origin of Others” came as a surprise to me. I was not expecting another book from Morrison and certainly wasn’t expecting a work of literary criticism. In a diversion from her most infamous works in fiction, the Pulitzer Prize- and Nobel Prize-winning author demonstrates her reflective and meticulous nature in this most recent work of nonfiction, offering her readership both surprise and consistency.
In “The Origin of Others,” Morrison confronts the concept of the “other” as a social formation created to define oneself and restrict humanity. She hypothesizes that violent …show more content…
A follow-up on her lectures in the Charles Eliot Norton series at Harvard University, in which Morrison was the fourth woman and the second black lecturer in the 92 years of the series’ existence, “The Origin of Others” manifests within her quest to uncover historical patterns of Othering and to confront the idea that one must “identify an outsider in order to define oneself.” Her lectures sought to uncover the human fear of estrangement that strengthens the incentive to create strict divisions of race, gender, class and sexuality, asserting that “the danger of sympathizing with the stranger is the possibility of becoming a …show more content…
She explains that “the spectacle of mass movement draws attention inevitably to the borders, the porous places, the vulnerable points where the concept of home is seen as being menaced by foreigners.” She roots her argument in the assertion that the fear of Otherness calls us to “deny the foreigner in ourselves and … resist to the death the commonness of humanity.” Morrison’s theory of Otherness is a step in the direction of articulating our relationships to each other today in a time in which questions of race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation and other cross-sections of identity are being brought to the
In “The Origin of Others,” Morrison confronts the concept of the “other” as a social formation created to define oneself and restrict humanity. She hypothesizes that violent …show more content…
A follow-up on her lectures in the Charles Eliot Norton series at Harvard University, in which Morrison was the fourth woman and the second black lecturer in the 92 years of the series’ existence, “The Origin of Others” manifests within her quest to uncover historical patterns of Othering and to confront the idea that one must “identify an outsider in order to define oneself.” Her lectures sought to uncover the human fear of estrangement that strengthens the incentive to create strict divisions of race, gender, class and sexuality, asserting that “the danger of sympathizing with the stranger is the possibility of becoming a …show more content…
She explains that “the spectacle of mass movement draws attention inevitably to the borders, the porous places, the vulnerable points where the concept of home is seen as being menaced by foreigners.” She roots her argument in the assertion that the fear of Otherness calls us to “deny the foreigner in ourselves and … resist to the death the commonness of humanity.” Morrison’s theory of Otherness is a step in the direction of articulating our relationships to each other today in a time in which questions of race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation and other cross-sections of identity are being brought to the