Frustrated mimetic aspiration converts into violence against non-Europeans

Evidence

Frustration follows for the misor unrecognized, a swelling fury at the lack of possibilities or cultural closures, a sense of unfulfillment of national possibility, an emerging national malaise at the swelling discontent, whether voiced politically or via criminality and social violence. Threat to wellbeing, if not to being itself, becomes threaded with a menace to society as such. And those experiences of malcontent and melancholy at inevitable failure of mimetic fulfillment seek compensation in other forms of gratification that both engage and exploit, often brutally, those considered non-European. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1138

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that failed Euro-mimesis channels into brutal exploitation of non-Europeans is suggestive but undertheorized here — worth chasing the empirical evidence for this displacement mechanism.
• SEED: An essay angle: how national ‘civilizational’ aspirations that fail get redirected against internal racial others, from Latin American mestizaje to other postcolonial settings.
• XREF: connects to: Anti-Japanese hysteria generalized into hostility toward European immigrants. — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 991; Unfulfilled unification promises triggered xenophobic violence against foreigners — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 207