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From "Foreign Natives" to "Native Foreigners": Explaining Xenophobia in Post-apartheid South Africa

By Neocosmos Michael

	15.00 E

"This is a timely book as xenophobia, narrow nationalism and chauvinism afflict many of our societies. Many descriptions and lamentations exist; but this is among the first to give us an explanation. And it is preeminently a political explanation to do with state and popular politics. Xenophobic discourses are ultimately structured by the state but contested in civil societies. They are neither inevitable nor insurmountable and can be transcended to build truly emancipatory discourses and courses of action. That is the message of the book; a remarkable intervention in the murky waters of divisive ideologies."

Issa G. Shivji, University of Dar es Salaam

"Questions of how belonging and exclusion occur and what is at stake in assertions of citizenship lie at the very heart of modern social life. In this trenchant critique of liberal politics and sociality, Neocosmos probes the etiology of xenophobia in South Africa, implicating the discursive practices and the historical trajectory of the State and the hegemonic language and ideology of human rights in the emergence of xenophobic anxieties. In this analysis, and the prescription of an alternative politics that follows, the resolution to forms of marginality and disenfranchisement must be initiated in a space outside of the State, in the realm of the ‘popular' and the ‘emancipatory'."

Kavita Misra, Columbia University

"This book is, by a considerable distance, the most important attempt to theorise xenophobia in contemporary South Africa. Neocosmos rejects fashionable attempts to explain xenophobia in terms of postmodernity and globalisation and notes that it was in 1961 that Frantz Fanon described the kind of situation where ‘foreigners are called on to leave; their shops are burned, their street stalls are wrecked.' For Neocosmos, following Fanon, the essence of the problem is in the politics of the post-colonial state. But Neocosmos does not only provide a diagnosis of the problem. His historicisation of the development of xenophobia in South Africa includes an examination of some of the actually existing emancipatory alternatives developed in the mass struggles against apartheid. He writes in fidelity to this tradition and for a recovery of popular emancipatory politics."

Richard Pithouse, Rhodes University

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