Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia

by George Makari

Overview

Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
A Bloomberg Best Nonfiction Book of 2021

A startling work of historical sleuthing and synthesis, Of Fear and Strangers reveals the forgotten histories of xenophobia—and what they mean for us today.

By 2016, it was impossible to ignore an international resurgence of xenophobia. What had happened? Looking for clues, psychiatrist and historian George Makari started out in search of the idea’s origins. To his astonishment, he discovered an unfolding series of never-told stories. While a fear and hatred of strangers may be ancient, he found that the notion of a dangerous bias called "xenophobia" arose not so long ago.

Coined by late-nineteenth-century doctors and political commentators and popularized by an eccentric stenographer, xenophobia emerged alongside Western nationalism, colonialism, mass migration, and genocide. Makari chronicles the concept’s rise, from its popularization and perverse misuse to its spread as an ethical principle in the wake of a series of calamites that culminated in the Holocaust, and its sudden reappearance in the twenty-first century. He investigates xenophobia’s evolution through the writings of figures such as Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus, and Richard Wright, and innovators like Walter Lippmann, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Frantz Fanon. Weaving together history, philosophy, and psychology, Makari offers insights into varied, related ideas such as the conditioned response, the stereotype, projection, the Authoritarian Personality, the Other, and institutional bias.

Masterful, original, and elegantly written, Of Fear and Strangers offers us a unifying paradigm by which we might more clearly comprehend how irrational anxiety and contests over identity sweep up groups and lead to the dark headlines of division so prevalent today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393652000
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/14/2021
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	1,115,853
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

George Makari is a psychiatrist, historian, and author most recently of Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind. Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, he lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Out of Beirut xi

Part 1 The Origins of Xenophobia

Chapter 1 In Search of Xénos 3

Chapter 2 Avant la lettre, or The Black Legend 17

Chapter 3 The First Xenophobes 39

Chapter 4 The Boxer Uprising 49

Chapter 5 Colonial Panic 62

Chapter 6 Commence the Unraveling 71

Chapter 7 Immigrant Boomerang 87

Chapter 8 The Road to Genocide 99

Part II Inside the Xenophobic Mind

Chapter 9 Little Albert and the Wages of Fear 129

Chapter 10 The Invention of the Stereotype 151

Chapter 11 Projection and the Negative of Love 175

Chapter 12 The Enigma of the Other 195

Chapter 13 Self Estrangements 213

Part III The Return of the Stranger

Chapter 14 Why We Hate Them 231

Chapter 15 The New Xenophobia 246

Coda: In the Pyrenees 267

Acknowledgments 271

Notes 275

Illustration Credits 325

Index 327

Editorial Reviews

★ 2021-06-29
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.

Kirkus Reviews

06/28/2021

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.)

Publishers Weekly

07/23/2021

This challenging historical work by psychiatrist/psychoanalyst Makari (DeWitt Wallace Inst. for the History of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical Coll.; Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind) examines xenophobia from ancient times to the present. He writes that the fear of strangers had been identified and discussed for centuries before it was named "xenophobia" during the 19th century, an era when phobias of all kinds were identified as worthy of medical diagnosis. He points out the irony that psychoanalysts defined the first "xenophobes" of the 20th century as those people in non-Western lands who challenged political, cultural, and economic colonizers' expansionist efforts; when resistance to colonialism became violent, as in the Boxer Rebellion in China, it was attributed to xenophobia. In the last century, with more frequent immigration to the West from colonies and former colonies, psychoanalysts reversed the meaning of xenophobia and applied it to fear within Western societies of people different from the dominant population. Makari takes many complex digressions—some enlightening; some not—as he moves toward his goal of analyzing the use of the word "xenophobia" in today's public life. VERDICT While parts of the book may appeal to general readers desiring to find the roots of today's widespread xenophobia, taken as a whole it is likely to disappoint those who need an introduction to this noteworthy topic.—Charles K. Piehl, Minnesota State Univ., Mankato

Library Journal

"Drawing on philosophy, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines, George Makari's beautiful writing delivers a strikingly original history... A sheer delight to read, this book is a gift for all."

Zia Haider Rahman

"Riveting....weaves together a fascinating if powerfully disturbing series of examples of stranger hatred (and exploitation) alongside the internal dissent such encounters have always prompted....Throughout his analysis, Makari brings an impressive range of reading to bear, wearing his learning lightly and interspersing fascinating capsule biographies of transformation figures like Raphael Lemkin, Carl Schmitt and Theodor Adorno with literary commentary on Aldous Huxley, Richard Wright and James Baldwin....All the material is enthralling."

New York Times Book Review - Thomas Chatterton Williams

"By shedding light on the trajectory of xenophobia during its 150-year history, this skillfully written account helps point us towards ways to combat it."

Washington Post - Rachel Newcomb

"[A] compelling story of racial and ethnic animosity."

Wall Street Journal - Adam Kuper

"With astonishing range and lucid erudition, George Makari has again given us an intellectual history that illustrates how little we know about the ideas that animate and rule our world…Breathtaking with its learnedness, dazzling as an easy-to-read narrative of complex ideas and knotty concepts…In an epoch where nations often appear cleaved into equally disdainful mobs, Makari makes an airtight case that an enhanced understanding of the concept ‘xenophobia’ can serve as a skeleton key that will help unlock many of the psychic terrors currently haunting our cognitive processes and social worlds."

Anthony Walton

"With elegance and passionate conviction, George Makari deconstructs one of the ugliest problems of our time…With penetrating insight, he reveals the history of a grave weakness that is one of the wildest threats against coherent democracy and human kindness…Of Fear and Strangers is at once a work of dispassionate reporting and brave moral righteousness"

Andrew Solomon