Book Description: Historicizing Fear: Ignorance, Vilification, and Othering

Historicizing Fear is a mixed bag. A few of the essays impress with their perspectives. However, most are unremarkable restatements of existing ideas, and one or two do not belong in this collection of scholarly work. The book would have benefited from more substantial editing that might have drawn better work from some of its contributors. Without going into too much detail, some articles illustrate the dangers inherent in the promiscuous use of terms without explaining why they apply. For example, Melanie Armstrong’s essay “Microbe Culture” describes cartoonish portrayals of microbes “as an unclean, racialist ‘Other.’” Without explanation, the use of the term “racialist” to describe a representation of a microbe is hard to understand. The infamous crows from the 1930s Disney cartoons offer us a comparison. The cartoonists used birds to allude to Black people using slang and pejorative interpretations of public images. The term racialist to describe the conduct of the Disney people who propagated this disgrace was well earned. However, plenty of birds figure in cartoons without being racialist (Donald Duck, anyone?). Is there something inherently racialist in portraying a frightening microbe in a bio-horror movie (one of Armstrong’s examples)? If so, what is it?

Adam C. Fong’s Southern Perils describes the process through which the Northern China-based Tang Dynasty (7th-8th Centuries CE) first othered its subjects in Southern China. Eventually, the Northern Chinese came to view their Southern people as “us.” We may think of othering as a specifically Western dysfunction. Nevertheless, here is a large society distant from most readers of this book in both time and culture that practiced it. It is a human phenomenon to be overcome like other common human faults. Moreover, Fong shows us a civilization that managed to correct itself, to stop “othering” a large group of its members who differed. The essay is both informative and optimistic.

The essay “Toward a Post-Racial Society, or a ‘Rebirth’ of a Nation” by Travis D. Boyce and Winsome M. Chunnu (editors of the book) is informative and gives grounds for pessimism. One of the best essays in the book examines D.W. Griffith’s cinematically innovative racist 1915 film Birth of a Nation. The authors show how patterns of White “anxiety and fear of Black equality” continue to plague American society. Writing on the one-hundredth anniversary of the release of Birth of a Nation, the authors open with the quote, “The more things change, the more things stay the same.”

Jeffrey A. Johnson’s Aliens, Enemy Aliens, and Minors: Anti-Radicalism and the Jewish Left is the only essay in the book to tackle an aspect of antisemitism. He focuses on the nexus of antisemitism and the opposition to radicalism in America at the beginning of the 20th Century, noting that “remarkably little work” is available on the topic. He suggests that fear of “Jewish radicalism,” which is to say anarchism, communism, socialism, and trade unionism, espoused by some Jews, influenced American attitudes before and during WW1 and in the decade following. He notes the role of nativism, based on fear of the “other” in American attitudes toward immigration and immigrants. He finds that “antisemitism (sic) was extraordinarily routine” (along the way, attacking the late professor Oscar Handlin who, in 1951, argued that it was “trivial”). His summary of antisemitic expressions and violence in the period is quite good. Reading what he writes is particularly trenchant. He says the antisemitism of the era “is a powerful reminder of how wartime anti-radicalism, often predicated on latent and outward antisemitism (sic), can stereotype people and limit liberties.”

The essays vary in style and quality. Generally, if the readers can plow through academic writing, they can plow through this book. Unfortunately, several essays suffer from overuse of jargon, over-long sentences, and other well-known afflictions of academic writing.

While the Johnson essay has apparent uses in teaching about antisemitism in America, other essays in this collection will find use in developing students’ understanding of context. Antisemitism in America has its unique characteristics, of course. Nevertheless, it functions in a society where racial tensions and ethnically based othering are profoundly and tragically embedded. The Boyce/Chunnu essay would be beneficial for this purpose. The book will probably not be helpful at a high school level, except for use by very talented students.

Bibliographic Information:
Boyce, Travis D., and Winsome M. Chunnu, eds. Historicizing Fear: Ignorance, Vilification, and Othering. Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2019.
ISBN: 978-1-64642-003-2