Toni Morrison’s The Origins of Others consists of a collection of lectures that she delivered at Harvard University. In the book, Morrison addresses the ways in which the otherness imposed on Black Americans creates conflict by defining our existence as inherently different from the norm of humanity. Morrison uses her vast knowledge of literature, psychology and history to expand on the idea of othering. Morrison describes the concept of the “other” as a social construct created to belittle people that don’t fall into their typical norm. When talking about the norm, this can be in respect to race, gender and many other ways. The two ways Morrison focused on throughout her book were race and gender. She talks about how the extravagant forms of othering, such as racism and sexism, are created because humans fail to realize that difference is not a threat to one’s self-identification. The Origins of Others is a difficult text to understand because of all the different excerpts by different authors that are placed throughout the book. Morrison talks about many interesting and thought provoking concepts in her book, however, her sporadic type of organization and use of highly intellectual terms and vocabulary makes it difficult for readers to keep up with her thought process. Especially if you do not have a scholarly background to understand and think about the information being referenced in the book. Her use of language and organization in the novel limits the number of audiences she is able to reach, but that does not contradict the fact that the novel overall is impactful.
The individual chapters each contain a different topic or theme that shows different ways of othering. Morrison talks a lot about people using race to diminish African Americans as you can see when she states “One wonders why, if these slaves were such a burden and threat, they were so eagerly bought, sold. We learn at last their benefit: forced “exercise, so beneficial to the negro is expanded in cultivating…”(5). From this excerpt Morrison is showing how through the use of othering, slave owners were able to ‘justify’ their acts of forced labor by saying that it is beneficial to their slaves health. Throughout her book she uses examples like this one to show how similar feats have been tried by virtually every group on earth.
The book is filled with Morrison’s inquiry into the ways that the origins of Othering reveals itself in people who feel a need to define a clear distinction between themself and people not like them. When referring to the Atlantic Slave Trade, Morrison meticulously picks apart racial myth and pseudo-science as fabrications caused by Othering, explaining that “the necessity of rendering the slave a foreign species appears to be a desperate attempt to confirm one’s own self as normal(34).” Continuing with her explanation, Morrison talks of the slave owners’ relentless insistence on establishing racial discrimination or otherness and inferiority that “the urgency of distinguishing between those who belong to the human race and those who are decidedly non-human is so powerful the spotlight turns away from the object of degradation but on its creator(56).” In both of these excerpts you can see how Morrison tries to show us that people need to classify people, that are different than them, as “other” to help them define themself.
In another part of the book, Morrison writes about how modern globalization worsens Othering by threatening man-made borders. She roots her argument in the belief that the fear of Otherness calls us to deny the foreigner qualities of ourselves. Morrison’s theory of Otherness is the first step in the direction of showing and exploring our relationships to each other today in a time in which questions of race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation are being brought to the surface. Morrison also believes that much of the disagreement caused by the current immigration crisis is fostered by our choice to deny our own foreignness and our quickly diminishing sense of belonging, both of which can be reinforced or minimized by literature. She acknowledges the danger in sympathising with the stranger is because we are scared of being seen as the stranger ourselves. She states that by creating and maintaining false ideas of ‘Otherness’, we deny them.
The book is an exceptional piece of writing and overall reflective analysis of a significant concept in human nature. Even though it may take being familiar with many scholarly texts to understand the references being used, Morrison is able to make many of her most important ideas accessible.