The Origin of Others
About this audiobook
“The Origin of Others combines Toni Morrison’s accustomed eloquence with meaning for our times as citizens of the world.” —Nell Irvin Painter, New Republic
Available for the first time in audio, America’s most revered 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 2016 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.
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About the author
Toni Morrison (1931–2019) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor. In 2012, President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She also received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Pulitzer Prize for literature, an American Book Award, the Norman Mailer Prize, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Condorcet Medal, the Thomas Jefferson Medal, and the Anisfield Wolf Book Award, among others. She wrote twelve novels, including Beloved, which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was made into a major motion picture starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover.
Robin Miles, named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, has twice won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration, an Audie Award for directing, and many Earphones Awards. Her film and television acting credits include The Last Days of Disco, Primary Colors, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order, New York Undercover, National Geographic’s Tales from the Wild, All My Children, and One Life to Live. She regularly gives seminars to members of SAG and AFTRA actors’ unions, and in 2005 she started Narration Arts Workshop in New York City, offering audiobook recording classes and coaching. She holds a BA degree in theater studies from Yale University, an MFA in acting from the Yale School of Drama, and a certificate from the British American Drama Academy in England.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, American writer, journalist, and educator, is the award-winning author of the memoirs The Beautiful Struggle and Between the World and Me. He was named one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2016 by Time.com. Between the World and Me was longlisted for the National Book Award and was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He has received the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, the George Polk Award, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center Prize, and a “Genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic.
