Abstract
The American election of President Donald Trump in 2016 represents a major shift in politics around the world. This historic moment coupled with the rise of far-right populism in Europe reveals a social and political backlash to liberal ideology in the West (Banulescu-Bogdan, 2016). With all that is happening, anti-immigrant attitudes and xenophobia have reemerged as an important field of study. The book Imagined Liberation: Xenophobia, Citizenship, and Identity in South Africa, Germany, and Canada delves deep into the cause, theoretical frame, and possible solutions to extreme and violent xenophobia in South Africa. While popular and media discussions around xenophobia often understand anti-immigrant attitudes to be about the economy and labor market, scarce government resources, nationalistic sentiments, and political scheming, this work moves away from this discourse while addressing its importance and reality in the South African context. One of the most important contributions of the work is found in their more psychological approach to developing a theory of xenophobia while also taking seriously the specific historical context of the South African case study.
The South African case is one of the most extreme and persistent cases of violent xenophobia in the contemporary world. Since the end of racially segregated apartheid in 1994, a new division has emerged, one between citizens and foreigners. Despite the nation-building project that portrays South African society as a ‘rainbow nation’, the country adopting 11 national languages, the people being incredibly proud of a flag that represents diversity and unity, and the historic peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy, South Africa has dealt with violent outbursts of anti-immigrant riots and extreme backlash toward immigrants in the post-apartheid era. These acts of violence are extreme, including throwing migrants off trains, lynchings, burning down entire communities, and mob-killings. Unlike other cases of xenophobia driven by race or religion, the South African case is predominately between Black South African citizens and Black African migrants. While there are some ebbs and flows of this trend, its consistency can be seen in local news reports on a nearly monthly basis over several years, with some of the worst and most globally recognized incidents occurring in May and June 2008. Imagined Liberation takes on the challenge of trying to understand this important case study, bringing in the lessons learned from the histories and immigration policies of Germany and Canada to look for possible insights and solutions to xenophobia.
The book is broken into three parts: the first begins with the case of South Africa, the second brings in comparisons with Germany and Canada, and the third concludes with a theory of xenophobia as well as alternatives and possible solutions. Overall, the approach of the book is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the case of South Africa with particular attention to a qualitative understanding in the tradition of ethnography – to see and understand how xenophobia is understood on the ground from the eyes of the people. The original data from the book is from surveys, interviews, and content analysis in the Western Cape Province of South Africa, especially from interaction with students in township schools. Most of the data is presented in Chapter 3. The data are not meant to be representative, but rather a vignette of how people think in regard to xenophobia. Comparisons with Germany and Canada are presented in Part II of the book. These comparisons are based on existing studies and theories, as well as some historical comparisons of trajectories. Ultimately, this all leads up to the major contribution of the book found in Part III where the work takes seriously the need for a theoretical framework for understanding xenophobia, ending with suggestions and alternatives of how one might go about addressing this important social problem, especially in the difficult case of South Africa.
Part I of the book sets up the importance of the South African case. Chapter 2 is particularly valuable in putting in conversation all relevant literature around xenophobia in South Africa. The authors note that most of this existing analysis either blames a history of apartheid or the post-apartheid state for its deficits in addressing and curbing anti-immigrant attitudes. Chapter 3 presents the work’s original data and provides an important contribution to the discussions around South African xenophobia. Through surveys and interviews in the township education system, the book shows that political education has not been successful as many are ambivalent or lack moral judgment in their response to attacks on foreigners. Quotes that reveal this attitude show that while individuals do not necessarily share anti-immigrant sentiments, they also do not have the moral basis for wanting to take action to protect or intervene in violent attacks against foreigners, claiming things like every person has a right to their opinion and their own actions. The authors conclude that far too much discussion is around the issues of rights when it comes to xenophobia in South Africa and more discussion needs to be around issues of responsibility and the integration of differences. This is indeed an important contribution of this work as it reveals a more qualitative understanding of citizens and their attitudes and sheds light on possible solutions (addressed later on in Chapter 8 and the ‘Conclusion’).
Chapter 4 retells the story of liberation in South Africa from a more critical view, especially for those not familiar with the South African case. The book addresses an important bias that often exists in understanding South African liberation – it is often thought of as a story of triumph, a negotiated revolution with minimal violence with special emphasis on the person of Nelson Mandela. While this side of liberation is true, the ugly side of the results of liberation needs equal attention and thoughtfulness. The book re-characterizes liberation around what happens in the years following the post-apartheid transition, showing how the state failed in many arenas including the economy, HIV/AIDS, crime, corruption, and poorly thought-out affirmative action. This last arena has taken place through the Black Economic Empowerment program and continues to perpetuate racialization in the post-apartheid era. During apartheid, those individuals who were classified as Colored were not white enough to obtain the resources and benefits from the government, and now in the post-apartheid era, this has been replaced with Coloreds not being black enough to receive such benefits. This reveals a contradiction in the understanding, attitude, and application of ideas of redistribution and resource allocation as well as misunderstandings in race and identity.
The second part of the book brings in comparative analysis of Germany and Canada as counter-examples to the South African case. Chapter 6 depicts Germany as a middle case, one where there is more openness than South Africa toward immigrants but still encounters issues of xenophobia with the rise of Islamic migrants. While Germans have a progressive attitude toward anti-semitism in particular due to its history, Islamophobia has emerged to become the central form of what xenophobia looks like in Germany. This is because of highly visible Islamic religious symbols and the connection to national security and terrorism. The result is a lack of integration and a prevalence of anti-immigrant sentiment.
Canada, on the other hand, represents the other end of the spectrum from the South African case, where a multicultural model has emerged that is intensely open toward immigrants and has resulted in the least amount of xenophobia in their society. This is all despite having a history of ethnic tensions and a racialized past. Chapter 7 begins by arguing that South Africa and Canada are alike in many ways including a similar colonial history, similar economic structures, and a similar racist history. One important difference, however, is that Canada saw culture positively whereas in South Africa, culture was used as a divide-and-rule strategy and therefore is seen as a sensitive and even negative feature in polity and society. The implication is that South Africa could learn much from the Canadian multicultural model, at least providing a basis for understanding what can be done to improve and move South Africa toward a more accepting society.
Although the title of the book implies that comparison is one of the main objectives of the work, Part II remains rather thin in terms of the amount of analytical comparison done between South Africa, Germany, and Canada. In reality, the book is centered profoundly on the South African case, and the involvement of Germany and Canada is more of an addition to provide some insight and suggest further investigation and possibilities. One could imagine an alternative approach that focuses the entire work around a comparative framework between these countries, doing more explanation and articulation about why these cases were chosen, providing a structured approach to seeing the most important differences and similarities, and using case study comparison as the driving analytical force and data source for new understandings and theoretical framings. Instead, this book is primarily filled with broad brushstrokes of understanding and comparison between the three cases. Given the title of the book, this ends up being one of the bigger disappointments of the work.
Having said that, Part III of the book provides the most critical and meaningful contributions to existing scholarship on xenophobia. Chapter 8 promotes the idea of a deep, complex, liberal political education as a possible tool to combat xenophobia. On page 150, it states, The aim is to acquire basic knowledge gained through a critical reading of the way institutions function and an understanding of how democracy works in practice at the local, national, and global levels … [It] also focuses on the process of deconstructing the causes of social conflict, the way in which diversity works, and the nature of dissent in society.
This deeper understanding of the relationship between cosmopolitanism and patriotism in light of current misgivings around South African nation building and the ‘rainbow nation’ is an important and insightful notion that responds to the earlier qualitative discovery of a failure of South African political education. At first, this proposition seems too small to tackle such a large, violent, and persistent problem as the case of South African xenophobia, but when considering other realistic alternatives, a deep political education seems to be the only thing that could provide a long-term, lasting change in both the society and polity in South Africa. While this is a long process, the book does not only rely on this education but also suggests three additional alternatives to minimize xenophobia in the meantime: legitimating migrants through policy, improving the conditions of refugee-producing countries, and actively integrating newcomers in South Africa. Much of this is taken from ideas presented in the Canadian multicultural model.
Chapter 9 introduces the book’s theory of xenophobia. While many existing theories of xenophobia focus on macrostructures such as the economy and the state, this book provides a refreshing perspective of a psychologically based theory focusing on the experience of individuals and how and why they might act violently xenophobic. The book draws on four perspectives: moral panic, Fanon postcolonial theory, Freudian theory of identity and distinction, and their own theory of identity assertion. In this theoretical frame, xenophobia is predominately a kind of moral panic, a kind of psychological reality more than an actual reality. Freud, in particular, is important in that his theory shows that people’s uniqueness is most threatened not by others with whom they share little in common but with those who most resemble them. The theory of identity assertion helps explain how this desire for distinction culminates in violent xenophobia. Citizens desire to distinguish themselves from foreigners who may ultimately have much in common with them. South African citizens feel real deprivation in their life and in their sense of identity. Xenophobic violence, then, represents a space where the citizen can retake power over the foreigner and reverse the feeling of humiliation and deprivation in their daily experience. This helps explain why research observes a joyful body language during these dreadful moments of violent outbursts against foreigners (Bekker, 2010), which is a sort of reclaiming of their identity. This psychological theory of xenophobia sheds light on the qualitative experience of those who engage in such violent and seemingly unexplainable atrocities.
The discussion around solutions and alternatives found in Chapter 8 and in the ‘Conclusion’ are important starting points of discussion for an increasingly relevant global problem. The book identifies the undermining role of hypocrisy between government actions and public political education, making education useless in changing xenophobic culture. The book also builds a strong case for a possible solution to a difficult task: creating new long-term societal norms that have a chance at replacing the norms inherent in a xenophobic society. One key consideration, however, in the work’s desire to apply Canada’s multicultural model to the South African case is the important role of geography. Canada is able to be incredibly selective about their immigration process because of their geographic location – being surrounded by oceans in the east and the west, while the United States acts as a sponge soaking up immigrants coming from the south. As Nee and Holbrow (2013) observe in the successful integration of Asian immigrants in America, geography results in a firm control over the immigration process resulting in only selective legal immigrants entering the country. This not only means that the immigrants are self-selected as higher class and better educated, but it also creates a different attitude, culture, and general discourse around immigration in the destination country leading to an attitude of acceptance. In this way, Canada has a huge advantage over South Africa simply because of its geography. However, the addition of complications such as refugees, unauthorized entry, low-educated and low-skilled migrants, and negative stereotypes and norms around immigrants all compound in the South African case making a multicultural model seem far less feasible.
Ultimately, Imagined Liberation provides insight into an important case study that not only interrogates the cause of xenophobia but also provides interesting alternatives to consider in thinking about how to combat this increasingly prevalent social problem. While the book lacks a deeper comparative frame and approach, it contributes a unique qualitative and psychological understanding to a field of study that lacks meaningful work from this perspective and is typically dominated by discussions around the social, economic, and political arenas. What is intriguing and impressive about this work is that it does not ignore these arenas, but instead seriously considers them in the case of South Africa while providing a new dimension of understanding that leads to new and interesting alternatives and suggestions. This book is therefore well suited for those who want to understand more about either the specific case of South African xenophobia or the general rising social problem of xenophobia. In the contemporary global political climate, it sheds light on important issues that require attention and further discussion.