La vision de la gran Toni Morrison, Premio Nobel de Literatura, sobre la vida y la identidad racial.

?Que es la raza y por que es importante? ?Que motiva la tendencia humana a construir Otros? ?Por que la presencia de esos Otros nos asusta tanto?.

Basandose en sus Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison aborda estas y otras cuestiones que dominan cada vez mas la politica mundial: la raza, el miedo, las fronteras, los movimientos de masas, el deseo de pertenencia… En su busqueda de respuestas, la novelista revisa cuidadosamente sus propios recuerdos, asi como la historia, la politica y, especialmente, la literatura, examinando autores como Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ernest Hemingway y William Faulkner. A traves de ellos analiza las nociones de pureza racial, el origen de la raza negra como una herramienta para definir una sociedad inmigrante con una gran variedad de procedencias y costumbres, o las formas en que la literatura emplea el color de la piel para definir a los personajes o conducir la narrativa.

Con un prologo de el ganador del National Book Award, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

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.