TY - BOOK AU - Morrison,Toni AU - Coates,Ta-Nehisi TI - The origin of others T2 - The Charles Eliot Norton lectures SN - 0674976452 AV - PS3563 .O8749 O76 2017 PY - 2017/// CY - Cambridge, Massachusetts PB - Harvard University Press KW - Morrison, Toni. KW - African Americans in literature KW - Blacks in literature KW - Race in literature KW - Racism in literature KW - Authorship KW - Literature, Modern KW - History and criticism KW - Identity (Psychology) KW - Belonging (Social psychology) KW - Population transfers KW - Globalization KW - United States KW - Race relations KW - History N1 - Foreword; by Ta-Nehisi Coates --; Romancing slavery --; Being or becoming the stranger --; The color fetish --; Configurations of blackness --; Narrating the other --; The foreigner's home N2 - America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity in The Origin of Others. In her search for answers, the novelist considers her own memories as well as history, politics, and especially literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Camara Laye are among the authors she examines. Readers of Morrison's fiction will welcome her discussions of some of her most celebrated books--Beloved, Paradise, and A Mercy.If we learn racism by example, then literature plays an important part in the history of race in America, both negatively and positively. Morrison writes about nineteenth-century literary efforts to romance slavery, contrasting them with the scientific racism of Samuel Cartwright and the banal diaries of the plantation overseer and slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood. She looks at configurations of blackness, notions of racial purity, and the ways in which literature employs skin color to reveal character or drive narrative. Expanding the scope of her concern, she also addresses globalization and the mass movement of peoples in this century. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Morrison's most personal work of nonfiction to date ER -