Of fear and strangers A history of xenophobia

Animosity toward those different from oneself has been the subject of long and convoluted debate, according to this scattershot study. Psychiatrist and historian Makari (Revolution in Mind) revisits milestones in Europe's hatred and oppression of outsiders from the Spanish conquest of the Americas to the Holocaust, but focuses on complex and sometimes contradictory intellectual explanations of xenophobia. It has been described, he notes, as a neurological ailment, an ideological prerequisite for nation-building, a response to economic competition, a conditioned reflex, or an outgrowth of cinematic stereotypes; meanwhile, thinkers including Freud, Adorno, and Sartre made xenophobia central to psychological development, proposing that the antagonism between "self" and "other" was at the heart of man's existential predicament. Makari's wide-ranging treatment draws on psychiatry, sociology, literary criticism--he devotes many pages to Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Richard Wright's Native Son--and his family's immigrant journey from Lebanon to suburban New Jersey. It's elegantly written, erudite, and often intriguing, but Makari's concepts of otherness and alienation are so vast that he includes everything from Simone de Beauvoir's take on sexism to Michel Foucault's interpretation of madness as critiques of xenophobia. The result is a distended theory that clarifies little by explaining too much. Photos. (Sept.)

Historical investigation of how the hatred of others blights society. Makari, a psychiatrist whose previous books probed the concept of mind and the origins of psychoanalysis, now turns to the vexed notion of xenophobia, "a word filled with sea-tossed exiles, dreams of welcome, and the flashing specter of violence." Tied to debates over "nationalism, globalization, race, and immigration," in 2016, with the ascent of Trump and his followers, an online dictionary cited xenophobia as the word of the year. Makari acknowledges that fear of strangers may be an innate response to encountering anyone outside of one's familiar group, although some evolutionary biologists argue that such a response would have prevented smaller bands of humans from merging to create diverse, cooperative societies. In this illuminating, significant historical study, the author focuses less on its origins than on when the concept was labeled "phobic"--that is, when it became widely condemned. He examines xenophobic behavior in 15th-century Spain, when the Catholic monarchs expelled Muslims and Jews; in European expansion into the Americas, when Native peoples were killed or enslaved; as central to the eugenics movement in the 19th century; during the influx of immigration in the early 20th century; and in the perpetration of genocides later in the century and into the next. After 1945, the term became taboo, but even earlier, Makari found, it caused disquiet. In 1923, the New York Times called xenophobia "a disease more dangerous to a free people than a physical plague." Influential journalist Walter Lippmann noted that xenophobia was inherent in stereotypes, "commonly held distortions of ethnic and national kinds." Makari sees xenophobia erupting in the U.S. and across Europe, which "economic competition and cultural invasion" are unable to explain. The grandson and child of immigrants, the author is not a detached academic. He clearly demonstrates his emotional connection to the material: How extreme will xenophobia become, and "who will stand to oppose it?" A timely and thorough investigation of a cultural plague. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.