European otherness fused attraction and repulsion into genocide and colonial dehumanization.

Evidence

Through the nineteenth century, the notions of “race,” language, and nationality mingled: nations were thought of as races (as in “Irish race” or “German race”) and races were viewed as language groups. All along, otherness has been an ambivalent notion, a combination of attraction (paradise lost, the appeal of the exotic) and repulsion. Romantic preoccupation with the past and the unknown was yet another face of the Enlightenment. The pathos of the wild, the remote, and the unknown may be interpreted as a secular version of pantheism or of the “hidden God” (deus absconditus). “Others” were embodiments of ideals (the noble or good savage), objects of desire, windows of mystery, or embodiments of fear (monsters, cannibals) and targets of hatred - scapegoats, as in antisemitism and the pogroms. “Nothing but otherness killed the Jews.” Genocides of indigenous peoples - native Americans, Tasmanians, Armenians - and dehumanizing treatment of slaves and “natives” - are part of the history of otherness. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 192

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the moral-panic literature and to Cohen’s scapegoating dynamics already in the reader’s curated notes.