“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.”
