Dienst van SURF
© 2025 SURF
Het boek The Return of the Native onderzoekt de terugkeer van nativisme. Auteurs Jan Willem Duyvendak en Josip Kesic schrijven over het veelgemaakte onderscheid tussen ‘echte’ en ‘onechte’ Nederlanders.
LINK
Right-wing discourses and issues of belonging and collective identity in Europe’s political and public spheres are often analysed in terms of Islamophobia, racism and populism. While acknowledging the value of these concepts, Kešić and Duyvendak argue that these discourses can be better understood through the logic of nativism. Their article opens with a conceptual clarification of nativism, which they define as an intense opposition to an internal minority that is seen as a threat to the nation due to its ‘foreignness’. This is followed by the analysis of nativism’s three subtypes: secularist nativism, problematizing particularly Islam and Muslims; racial nativism, problematizing black minorities; and populist nativism, problematizing ‘native’ elites. The authors show that the logic of nativism offers the advantages of both analytical precision and scope. The article focuses on the Dutch case as a specific illustration of a broader European trend.
LINK
Jan Willem Duyvendak and Josip Kesic, with Timothy Stacey, explore how nativist logics have infiltrated liberal settings and discourses, primarily in the Netherlands as well as other countries with strong liberal traditions like the US and France. They deconstruct and explain the underlying logic of nativist narratives and show how they are emerging in the discourses of secularism (a religious nativism that problematizes Islam and Muslims), racism (a racial nativism that problematizes black anti-racism), populism (a populist nativism that problematizes elites), and left-wing politics (a left nativism that nativists themselves as a threat to national culture). By moving systematically through these key iterations of nativism, the authors show how liberal ideas themselves are becoming tools for claiming that some people do not belong to the nation. This book illuminates the resurgence of the figure of the "native," who claims the country at the expense of those perceived as foreign.