The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison (review)

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about The Origin of Others is its title, which has a distinctly phenomenological flavor. It seems to promise readers acquainted with Continental philosophy an exploration of conscious acts that create an "other" and perhaps even some insight into what it means to be a "self." Here and there, we do find a couple of reflections on the biased racial and gender intentions that can shape our perception of others. Most negative social conditioning of this sort is based on the desire to have power over them. But generally, the six lectures that Morrison delivered as the 2016 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University cover ground that is all too familiar for anyone who has studied black American history. Readers who know absolutely nothing about the "black experience" (and that is probably the majority of white Americans, and many black ones as well) will feel better informed and maybe appreciative when Morrison reports (as many other writers have done) that racist doctors in the nineteenth century concocted a disease, "drapetomania," to explain why slaves felt the need to run away. Or when she lists nine black people lynched or brutally murdered by whites in the twentieth century, the last being Emmett Till. Or when she points out glaringly racist passages in the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Faulkner, and Hemingway. Or when she details ugly acts of violence by slave masters and concludes that it was they, not their slaves, who were uncivilized and sadistic. Often, as Morrison dwells on the obvious truth that racism is a bad thing, she sprinkles her lectures with explanations for how and why she composed some of her novels in certain ways. These passages will be, I am sure, of interest to her fans and to literary scholars.