The Origin of Others (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

The central theme of The Origin of Others is the importance of literature in conveying ideas about race and Othering. In each chapter, as Morrison looks at different aspects of the process of Othering, she provides literary examples and analysis that show destructive and constructive uses of literature. Morrison has a sense of the tremendous influence that artistic media can have in promoting ideas about social constructs and what it means to be human. She writes in Chapter 2 that “routine media presentations deploy images and language that narrow our view of what humans look like (or ought to look like) and what in fact we are like (37). While language can have its estranging effects, she also notes that it “can encourage, even mandate, surrender, the breach of distances among us” (35).

In The Origin of Others, Morrison provides examples of both uses of language: to estrange people from each other or to bring them closer. Her analysis of the works of white authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, and Albert Camus demonstrates the use of language to convey ideas about Others that reinforce the distance created by social and political systems that enshrine difference.