For such a slight volume, The Origin of Others is a multigeneric surprise: a theory of others and motivations for othering; reflections on histories and episodes of race, racing, and racism; meditations by Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison on her own works in light of such things; associated bits of memoir; quick readings of various authors, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Camara Laye, and Flannery O’Connor; and perhaps most biting of all, commentary on colorism within US Black communities. Ta-Nehisi Coates in a brief foreword likens the book to Racecraft, the race-debunking volume by Karen Fields and Barbara Fields, but Morrison is interested in racial othering less as fictive ruse than as a product of self-alienation and insecurity. Her theme is the projection onto others of what the self cannot abide.
For scholars who study such matters, this will not exactly be news, but nor is Morrison’s endeavor here to...
