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George Makari, in his wide-ranging and very readable book, examines the nature of stranger anxiety and hatred not by focusing on the extensive history and literature of tolerance, but by a comprehensive and fascinating excavation into the less known and more recent history of the use of the word “xenophobia”; by so doing he adds to our understanding of intolerant states of mind and provides a novel framework for trying to combat attacks on otherness:
By recovering its rich past, encompassing far more than an animus against immigrants, and by examining the numerous examples of stranger hatred to which it is linked, we may repurpose the term so that it serves to organize and promote attempts at synthesis. (237)
In his Prologue, Makari sketches out the personal journey which led to the writing of the book. His Lebanese parents eventually settled in the USA in 1955, although never felt completely at home there, often feeling strangers in their New Jersey environment. Makari, however, learned to feel comfortable there, able to navigate his way through the fact that at home he and his
sisters spoke a mélange of English, French and Levantine Arabic. However, a trip to Beirut in 1974, to a country once seemingly a haven of tolerance of different cultures but then racked by war between a variety of factions, brought him face to face with what can happen when “neighbours transform into strangers, strangers into enemies, and a society dissolves in a bath of fear and hatred” (xxi).
That experience remained to some extent dormant while Makari got with his American life and career as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, but, as he describes in the penultimate chapter, was revived when he came to London in May 2016 to promote a previous book and found to his shock and surprise that the UK was about to vote on leaving the European Union, with the fear of immigration being a major theme of the election. The reality of the Brexit vote, and then a few months later the election of Donal