Class 7 - Romancing the Other
Welcome
In this week’s session, we’re looking at Toni Morrison’s first essay in her book The Origin of Others. We’re going to be asking how the process of “othering” works. In particular, we are looking at how human beings justify treating other human beings as if they are other than fully human, and therefore treating them in ways they would not like to be treated themselves.
The Golden Rule
You have probably come across the so-called “golden rule”, the principle that we should extend to others the same consideration that we would hope or wish should be extended to we ourselves. This exists in various forms in many traditions — Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu and on. So this kind of othering we are talking about is a process by means of which people have justfied going against this rule. We may have certain wishes and desires that we would hope others would take into account — or that we demand others should take into account. But other people, for whatever reason, are not granted the same consideration.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison was a novelist who was born in 1931 and died in 2019. In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The book is developed from the text of a series of lectures that Morrison gave at Harvard on the “literature of belonging” in 2016.
Initial questions
Before we start diving in, what questions did the text raise for you? Let’s take 10 minutes to read through your fellow students’ submissions on the discussion board, and to reply to any posts that interest you.
Discussion Groups
Now we’ll go into discussion groups. In your groups, I want you to appoint a spokesperson, and then to prepare a concise summary to present.
Chapter 1: Romancing Slavery
Let’s get a bit more of an overview of the territory that Morrison covers.
In this chapter, Morrison tackles the question of how ideas of otherness are always tied up with the “categories of worth or rank.”
She explores this idea in the context of the history of slavery, beginning with a discussion of Samuel Cartwright’s 1851 book, Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race (1851).
Morrison makes the point that the specific forms that racism (and other forms of Othering) take are learned — i.e. cultural — forms of behaviour.
How does one become a racist, a sexist? Since no one is born a racist and there is no fetal pre-disposition to sexism, one learns Othering not by lecture or instruction but by example. (p. 6)
But it is hard to sustain this othering. It is a clear violation of the Golden Rule. We wouldn’t want to be enslaved, but it’s okay that they are enslaved… So Morrison asks how we can accommodate such othering. The answer she gives is this:
One of the ways nations could accom-modate slavery’s degradation was by brute force; another was to romance it. (p. 6)
Today, we’re going to talk about this combination of force and romancing in how we respond to the other.
Discussion
We’ll start by looking at the following question
- What do you think romancing slavery means?
- In the context that Morrison is writing about, how did this romancing happen?
Break!
Let’s have a tea break to rest our brains.
Research Activity
What I want you to do for the rest of the session is to work in groups on the following research task.
- Take one group within your society, or a society you know, that faces this kind of “othering.”
- What examples can you find of romancing as a way of sustaining this othering?
Share your findings with the whole group at the end of the session.
Homework
For your homework this week, I want you to read chapter 2, which is called “Being or Becoming the Stranger.” On Canvas, post two questions that the text has provoked for you.