Toni Morrison (1931–2019) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Pulitzer Prize. The author of numerous critically acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, she was the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, at Princeton University. Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle and Between the World and Me.
Morrison’s new book of essays, The Origin of Others, shows that the
sick, sad world in which her novels are set is an old one—one that
she yearns to lean out of, one we’re falling right back into
instead. The Origin of Others is, at once, a critique, memoir, and
writer’s notebook; the Nobel Prize–winning author explicates the
observations and inspirations behind some of her most prized
novels. The book draws from her Norton Lectures, in which she
discusses race, borders, history, and other literary heavyweights
such as Flannery O’Connor and Ernest Hemingway. Readers could
consider this book a companion to her Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, if they want a pellucid
look at the racial minefield throughout American literature.
*The Millions*
It is hard not to want more than an afternoon with her incisive
mind…Her essays are richly embellished with anecdote and memory,
but grounded in literary analysis. Morrison looks to literature as
a potent site of prejudicial tuition…Drafted in the months before
Brexit and Donald Trump, it is hard not to see The Origin of Others
as politically prescient.
*The Australian*
For those who want to understand better the process of inventing
others, its literary past, and the tendency in us all to dismiss
others clamoring for a sense of belonging, The Origin of Others is
a must-read. Morrison’s fans will appreciate her hauntingly clear
reading of the times, even while she remains true to her literary
aesthetic. New readers can look to this text as a foray into the
mind of one of the greatest thinkers of our time. With the same
revolutionary simplicity as Martin Buber’s I and Thou, Morrison
reminds us once again that whatever can be said of the self is
always determined by how one stands in relation to the other.
*Christian Century*
If you’ve ever wanted to take a peek into the brilliant mind of
Toni Morrison, look no further than her latest book. In The Origin
of Others, Morrison dissects all the thematic elements that
frequent her work, and sheds light on what inspires her and what
keeps her up at night. Based on her Norton Lectures, the renowned
novelist delves deep into how literature has shaped society’s
perceptions of race over the years, as well as how some of her most
beloved books came to be. Plus, it has a brilliant introduction
from Ta-Nehisi Coates!
*Shondaland*
Pulitzer– and Nobel Prize–winning novelist Morrison analyzes the
language of race and racism and the classification of people into
dehumanizing racial categories in American culture… Lyrically
written and intelligently argued, this book is on par with
Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination and The Black Book.
*Publishers Weekly (starred review)*
This is an intriguing and timely series of reflections on race,
fear, belonging and otherness.
*The ARTery*
This volume collects the great novelist’s Norton lectures at
Harvard University, giving those of us who didn’t get to attend a
glimpse at Morrison’s thoughts on race and otherness, and how these
things affect literature and lives around the world.
*The Millions*
[A] slender but profound volume.
*Newsday*
The Origin of Others is a must read.
*PopSugar*
From legendary writer and thinker Toni Morrison comes a book that
deals with one of the thorniest topics of our time: race…What is
race? What motivates us to construct otherness? What makes us so
afraid of one another? Probing, brilliant, and beautifully
rendered, The Origin of Others is destined to become one of the
major sociological texts of our time.
*Refinery29*
Every literature lover who dreams of studying with Toni Morrison
will devour The Origin of Others, a new collection of her Harvard
lectures on race, literature, and otherness.
*San Diego Magazine*
What is sure to be her most personal and self-reflecting work in
nonfiction yet, Morrison delves further into the themes that have
always been crucial to her canon: race, politics, history,
identity, et al.
*W Magazine*
Morrison explores how cultures, societies, and individuals develop
the notion of the Other, the reasons for it, the perceived benefits
of distinguishing based on what many insist are racial traits
despite the slipperiness of concepts of race…In this slim volume,
Morrison shares again her enormous talent for examining the
complexity of race and racial identity, the inhumanity that results
from ‘othering’ a fellow human being, the justifications for
cruelty that has resulted in romanticized images of slavery and
oppression, and how the perversity of racism reverberates through
centuries.
*Booklist*
Melding memoir, history, and trenchant literary analysis, Nobel
Prize laureate Morrison offers perceptive reflections on the
configuration of Otherness…As sharp and insightful as one would
expect from this acclaimed author.
*Kirkus Reviews*
May be [Morrison’s] most comprehensive look at race in America to
date.
*Pacific Standard*
[Morrison] traces through American literature patterns of thought
and behavior that subtly code who belongs and who doesn’t, who is
accepted in and who is cast out as ‘Other.’ …The Origin of Others
combines Toni Morrison’s accustomed eloquence with meaning for our
times as citizens of the world.
*New Republic*
The Origin of Others gives readers around the world a chance to
take a peek inside the insightful mind of one of America’s most
celebrated novelists… Equal parts challenging and engaging, reading
The Origin of Others is like learning from the literary legend
herself.
*Bustle*
It is hard not to read Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others in the
light of recent disturbing political developments in the U.S…
Morrison considers the fetishization of skin color and the
questions posed by our era of mass migration, and offers elegant
reminders of some well-known but still unpalatable facts… She shows
how a single word choice in a Hemingway novel can exploit and
fortify any number of racialized fetishes and revulsions, and she
also explains, with a dispassionate attention to technique, why and
how Hemingway made such choices as a writer, the useful short cuts
they allowed him to take for the purposes of narrative and
character and mood.
*The Guardian*
Morrison trains her well-aimed pen at the themes that only a titan
such as herself can so gracefully take on like race, fear, borders
and the mass movement of people, for example.
*NBC News*
Toni Morrison is the one of the great contemporary analysts of race
and identity…Here she develops in a more concerted way than we find
in her earlier work the means by which racist ideologies obliterate
the possibility of knowing others, and stifle the chance we are
afforded to gain knowledge of ourselves…Morrison draws on a series
of episodes from [America’s] literature and history, and examines
them in relation to salient moments from her own life. The
resulting work is transformative, exhilarating, distressing. And
acutely and urgently necessary…The Origin of Others is full of
insights. They are made all the more persuasive by Morrison’s
elegant, plangent prose, and by her refusal to exclude herself from
those mythologies of otherness of which we are all the unhappy
legatees. To read this wise, probing and inspiring book is to
acquaint yourself with a writer who is a foe of that inheritance
and a vital friend of the human project.
*The National*
In a series of essays that provides equally unique insights into
American literary history and Morrison’s own mind, The Origin of
Others explores how otherness, particularly racial difference, is
socially constructed, and the ways Morrison has always worked to
explore and confound that construct through her writing.
*The Literary Show Project*
The Nobel Prize–winning novelist employs literary criticism,
history, and memoir to illustrate how power imagines difference in
order to legitimize oppression… As Barack Obama completed a
two-term presidency, and his attorneys general launched
investigations into police brutality across the country, it seemed
reasonable to assume that the United States was finally preparing
to acknowledge and address the structural racism that underpins its
society. The intervening year has exposed that as a dangerous
assumption, and made required reading of a book that, in any sane
version of the present, should have marked how much progress had
recently been made and how far was yet to go.
*Art Review*
[Morrison] is doing what she does best, using historical, personal
and current events to explore how racism continues to divide
society. Drawing on issues of globalization and the mass movement
of people, she explores how the presence of others contributes to
belonging. The book is as good as I had expected. Morrison’s
narrative is both powerful and chilling as she takes us on a
journey that shocks and enlightens but forever reminds us that,
‘The definition of Americanness (sadly) remains color for many
people.’
*Times Higher Education*
A slim volume that contains multitudes. It can be read in one
sitting, yet it’s a book that readers will likely return to
frequently for its conceptual richness, catholic knowledge, and
political imagination…Literature, Morrison argues throughout The
Origin of Others, is central to shaping social imaginations of
hate, and conversely, literature has the potential to help us
envision better worlds and better futures…Morrison deftly moves
between literary analysis, personal memoir, historical research,
critical theory, and politics. And moreover, she does so with
incredible clarity and grace. Her intended audience is not
specialists in narrow fields, but wide and broad publics…We live in
a regime in which nation-states can blind us from seeing the
tragedies and genocides unfolding beyond our artificial borders.
Toni Morrison's latest book challenges us in subtle and profound
ways to see beyond such artifices. We need literary fictions to see
the many violences of our political fictions.
*PopMatters*
In this era of stark division, distrust and state-sponsored
xenophobia, it is hard to imagine a more timely and laudable
message than the plea for understanding, with its separation of the
fact of culture from notions of racial essentialism, and its
implicit faith in the importance, and transformative power, of
literature.
*Times Literary Supplement*
The autobiographical moments in The Origin of Others are the most
interesting paragraphs within this book. Peeking into the life of
this Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s personal life to understand
her concerns for black America, provides a logical solution in
shaping black identity—control our narrative… The Origin of Others
moved me to be more conscious of what type of language and behavior
I, a hip-hop journalist and aspiring historian, put into the
world.
*VIBE*
A painful and powerful study of race as it affected [Morrison’s]
writing and her reading. The book is clear and challenging.
Attitudes are eloquently investigated.
*Irish Times*
There is another aspect to otherness: how we cope, survive,
rationalize and discriminate by creating, in our minds and habits,
others. No book addresses this more profoundly than Toni Morrison’s
small book of essays, The Origin of Others…It’s Trumpism that makes
her insights essential now…Morrison addresses the ‘romancing of
slavery’ in our literature and history. She looks carefully at what
‘being or becoming a stranger’ means in American life. She analyzes
our fetishes with darkness, our preoccupations with blackness and
the tropes we perpetuate regarding Africa: menace, depravity,
incomprehensibility. This is not easy, comforting reading for a
Christmas morning, but it is a book we need to be talking
about.
*America*
Morrison expertly dissects the nuanced conversations around race
and why they matter.
*InStyle*
Morrison has much to say about events that are not only on the
American mind, but the global one, as she ranges over nostalgic
returns to slavery, the pervasive use of racial epithets by white
writers, and the forced migration of an unprecedented number of
displaced people…In The Origin of Others, Morrison revisits ways of
reading American literature, but also expands her scope to ponder
the meaning of race itself, and how it lodges itself in both
individual and collective imaginaries.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
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