Any study of anti-colonial movements – ranging from slave revolts in the Caribbean to the Ghaddar of 1857 and the struggle for independence in India (in the first half of the twentieth century) to the Algerian war of independence – offers instances of resistance that carry clear xenophobic tones. For instance, when European women and children were killed as part of a rebellion or a struggle for freedom in all these parts of the world. But the same struggles also contain examples of resistance that are obviously more “principled” and not aimed simply at a foreigner or stranger.

How does one understand such opposition and resistance? Can one call such people xenophobic, even when they are obviously reacting to an invasion? If one cannot, how can one simply dismiss the perception of, for example, Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian rightist-zealot who murdered about 76 people in twin attacks in Norway in July 2011 because, as his rambling “manifesto” indicates, he feels that his country is being invaded by Muslims and immigrants?

Is any act of resistance to a stranger naturally an aspect of xenophobia?

If so, what happens to so many, perhaps all, kinds of “just” group resistance, whether in terms of gender, class, or nationality? How can we distinguish between just resistance and xenophobic violence?

The fact that we have to ask questions like this today reveals a change in our thinking. There is a tendency in some circles to condemn any act of overt violence, which makes it impossible to talk of liberation or freedom or revolution in the ways in which these concepts were used less than a century ago. Some of it arises from a genuine objection: as Mahatma Gandhi put it somewhere, an eye for an eye ends up making the whole world blind. Violence, it has been noted, spreads like a virus; it spreads by infecting others. Hence, it seems counterproductive to answer violence with violence.

And yet the fact remains: sometimes violence is done to people. Power is always being negotiated, bartered, and grabbed by individuals and groups, and this can happen with overt or covert violence. It can happen in ways that allow the other and/or the out-group equivalent space to construct, empower, and unfold itself, or ways that deny and curtail that space, which is what happens with all kinds of xenophobia.

People can be killed, countries invaded, economies crippled. Some violence, it can be argued, is in any case necessary; for instance, the policing violence of democratic states, which protects ordinary citizens from criminals like drug-pushers (some of whom, but not necessarily the majority, can be “strangers”). Evidently, it is one thing to say that violence should not be propagated or preached as a remedy; it is another thing to maintain that it invalidates its objects. This is because violence, in many forms, exists and affects us even when no physical or overt violence takes place or seems to take place.

We need to look at some forms of physical violence associated with obvious examples of xenophobia, all of which have thousands of factual equivalents. A quintessential version is fictionalised in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Okonkwo, the flawed hero, is told that an entire neighbouring tribe (the Abame) has been wiped out by Europeans because the tribe had killed a strange European who had turned up on a horse from nowhere.

Here, if we bracket the aspect of colonial retributive justice, we have a clear case of xenophobia: the European is killed for being a stranger (out of place). History gives us thousands of similar examples – the European missionary killed in the colonies; the Australian aborigine killed for trespassing on settler lands; the unarmed African-American shot by a white man because he looked suspicious, most recently in the controversial Trayvon Martin–George Zimmerman case.

In Achebe’s fictionalised rendition, while the tribe has reasons to fear strangers who look like the (murdered) European, having heard tales of attacks and persecution by European colonisers elsewhere, this does not justify their action, as they had no way of knowing whether this particular European stranger was hostile or not, as at least one of Okonkwo’s companions realises: “Never kill a man who says nothing. Those men of Abame were fools. What did they know about the man?”

In some ways, this kind of stranger goes back to our most basic, and entirely deceptive, notion of strangers.

This is the stranger as someone from without, as someone totally unknown. There are two basic problems with this definition.

First, it is almost impossible for a total stranger to appear. When the stranger seems to appear from nowhere, he has already been constituted within “us”. Even Columbus did not meet “total strangers” in the New World – his strangers had already been constituted in the minds of his generations, through discourses as divergent as those of the noble savage, cannibalism, and, in the case of the English, prejudices relating to those “niggers of Europe” (as a living Irish novelist puts it), the Irish.

This is why, despite not knowing their languages, Columbus and his men could so readily divide these new peoples into just two tribes, the Arawak and the Caribe, each with thoroughly known propensities.

I will illustrate this further a bit later in this chapter with the use of a purely fictional stranger, the literary vampire, who despite not existing in real life still contains not just what is unknown, but also what is thoroughly known. In short, there is no pure or total stranger in any society, also because (and this is the second problem with our myth of the pure alien) such a stranger would simply not be comprehensible.

The vampire is an apt generic “stranger” to use to illustrate this, as it is not just a fiction based on facts, but also a fiction rooted in the essential facts of capitalism, as Karl Marx intuited when he repeatedly described capital as a vampire, an invisible, fluid, dead power that lives off the blood of the living, coming alive to the extent that it renders the living dead.

There is, of course, a prior history of this fiction of the vampire, and that too, as we shall see, grows out a very factual history of the struggle for power and dominance. The fictional vampire exists, paradoxically, as an index of and limit to factual “normality”. This is not surprising. The strangeness of the stranger is always a definition of our own normality; without it the stranger ceases to come into being qua stranger.

It is, therefore, not surprising to come across incidents of xenophobic violence between many peoples who have lived together in the past (as the break-up of Yugoslavia reminded us recently, and as we are constantly reminded by the Sri Lankan strife, as well as by recently escalating conflicts in places like Libya or Iraq) and often still live together in the present with a degree of tolerance. A common such flashpoint in relations between people who mostly live and work together takes place when we have what are called Hindu–Muslim riots in India.

The most concentrated occurrence of such riots took place in the 1947-8 years of India’s Independence and its aftermath when the country was partitioned (partly because of colonial manipulation and partly due to nationalist demands on both sides) into a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. Studies of the Partition as well as of later Hindu-Muslim conflicts inevitably illustrate how people who have shared a culture, a past, or even a childhood, found themselves pushed into the position of strangers who had to be combated.

Evidently, in such instances, we have the traces of a stranger being constructed before our very eyes out of a familiar person; a certain understanding of self and other turns a person into not just a stranger, but a hostile or detestable one, a stranger who has to be eliminated. This stranger, who is just as common to xenophobia as the previous (“unknown”) type, is also just as obviously constructed.

While in both cases the myth of the hidden danger represented by the stranger is raised as a justification, the fact remains that we are not talking of pure strangers. We are talking of strangers whose difference we know, and of differences that are visible to us. If these differences are hidden, this has been (argue xenophobes) done with an evil intention in order to keep them from becoming visible to us, so that we can be harmed unaware.

In both these common constructions of strangers (the “pure stranger” and the “stranger within”), we see the ways in which fear (also as detestation, hatred, etc.) overlaps with difference and with what can be called contact/border. Xenophobia, old or new, is constructed out of a selective amalgamation and formulation of these three elements: fear, difference, and contact/border.

Excerpted with permission from The New Xenophobia, Tabish Khair, Oxford University Press.