The Origin of Others, by Toni Morrison

The Origin of Others, by Toni Morrison
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Arrival at the rehearsal space, Toni Morrison delves into a simple idea, that of others. A conception that ends up conditioning fundamental aspects such as coexistence in a globalized world or interaction at all levels between different cultures.

It is what there is today, communication between races, education, languages, beliefs and customs is already necessary from the simply social to the political and commercial. The world is a Tower of Babel in which the feeling of belonging can guide us towards openness or towards the most archaic ethnocentrism.

And the truth is that in the apparent chaos it is easy for populisms to attract the members of one area to highlight the common enemy in those others.

It is not easy to harbor full hope of integration in a world of limited resources. But the worst of the drifts ends up marking a territory like that dreaded "lebensraum", the living space so often prescribed by Nazism, for example, and which gives the inhabitants of a place full power over a territory that is certainly delimited. by the borders raised in the political imaginary against the natural right of every human to seek life, a right sustained in the most primordial ethics that ends up being distorted oriented towards the survival of one's own.

Today the others are already, in a high percentage, a class configuration that only differentiates between rich and poor. And precisely for this reason, the exploitation of third world countries whose long-suffering inhabitants are later denied the simple right to fulfillment, survival, hope, wherever there is a possibility for it.

Based on all this, that perception of others is born, an abstraction that can be positive or negative, depending on the focus of each one, and that Toni Morrison comes to decipher in this powerful book with the idea of ​​refocusing the perverse side of others. as common enemies, as threatening elements for their own culture.

From a very personal and lucid perspective, Morrison rambles between the literature of great authors and his own experiences, composing a mosaic that, from the literary point of view, serves to decipher nuances that help labeling and prejudice.

In a final reading, Morrison's intention can be deduced for endorsing the need for feelings of belonging as something atavistic of the human being, but saving the limiting well of an ethnocentrism as limiting as it is dangerous.

You can now buy the book The Origin of Others, the new book by Toni Morrison, here:

The Origin of Others, by Toni Morrison
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