[Review of] Juan F. Perea, ed. Immigrants Out!: The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States

Immigrants Out! offers a response to nativist sentiment in the contemporary discussion of immigration policy. Individually, each chapter in this edited volume charts the development of contemporary nativist sentiment, while identifying the themes that have nurtured nativism historically. Some important relationships are identified between issue oriented politics and more general theses that emerge from nativist thought. For instance, in several passages English-only laws are described as a small, although highly symbolic, component of a broader ideology based on separatism and isolationism. Similarly, proposals to place restrictions on social welfare benefits for immigrants are linked to the more general curtailment of human rights. Moreover, the current trend toward heightened restrictions on immigration and naturalization is paralleled with restrictive immigration policies of the past

It Didn’t Start with Proposition 187: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Nativist Legislation in California

The writer surveys California\u27s long history of nativist legislation. In doing so, he demonstrates that three recent Californian ballot initiatives—Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot that denied public services such as education and nonemergency medical care to so-called illegal aliens, Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action in the public sector, and Proposition 227, which banned bilingual education in public schools—were not just a spasmodic backlash against recent demographic trends but were the culmination of a century-and-a-half of nativist politics in California. He shows that, from the beginning of statehood, anti-immigrant laws aimed at Latin-Americans and Asian-Americans have received broad support from the California electorate, which has always been, and still is, predominantly white and native-born

Beyond cultural and national identities : current re-evaluation of the Kominka literature from Taiwan\u27s Japanese period

This paper is an offshoot of a larger, ongoing project that intends to deal with the relationship between various artistic formations and the dominant culture in Taiwan\u27s post-1949 era. Though the lifting of martial law in 1987 has demarcated this era into two drastically different periods and a clearer contour of the new period seems to be just beginning to emerge in the mid-1990s, various cultural forces are still busily negotiating with each other. Nonetheless, there seems to be a general consensus as to what constitutes a core of the new dominant culture: the spirit of pen-t\u27u, or a nativist imperative that obliges one to treat Taiwan as the center in one\u27s cultural mapping. The primary driving force for this recent reconstitution of Taiwan\u27s dominant culture undoubtedly came from the momentous changes in the political arena in the post-martial law period. This rather crude factor, however, should not obscure our vision of the longer, more far-reaching evolutionary process of cultural change in contemporary Taiwan. Simply put, since the early 1980s, the older cultural hegemony has been seriously contested by forces coming from the Taiwanese cultural nationalism advocated in a vibrant pen-t\u27u (nativization) trend on the one hand, and from various radical cultural formations on the other. Limited by space, this paper will only deal with specific aspects of the nativization trend, with the main paradigm taken from the literary field. The paper will begin with a brief overview of the indigenous literary discourse in Taiwan’s post-1949 era, followed by analyses of recent scholarly re- evaluations of the Kominka literature from Taiwan’s Japanese period. Through this investigation, I hope to reach a better understanding of some important issues pertaining to contemporary cultural transformation in Taiwan, such as the role of cultural nationalism, the problem of identity construction, and efforts toward institutionalizing Taiwanese literary studies as an academic discipline

What’s wrong with the minimal conception of innateness in cognitive science?

One of the classic debates in cognitive science is between nativism and empiricism about the development of psychological capacities. In principle, the debate is empirical. However, in practice nativist hypotheses have also been challenged for relying on an ill-defined, or even unscientific, notion of innateness as that which is “not learned”. Here this minimal conception of innateness is defended on four fronts. First, it is argued that the minimal conception is crucial to understanding the nativism-empiricism debate, when properly construed; Second, various objections to the minimal conception—that it risks overgeneralization, lacks an account of learning, frustrates genuine explanations of psychological development, and fails to unify different notions of innateness across the sciences—are rebutted. Third, it is argued that the minimal conception avoids the shortcomings of primitivism, the prominent view that innate capacities are those that are not acquired via a psychological process in development. And fourth, the minimal conception undermines some attempts to identify innateness with a natural kind. So in short, we have little reason to reject, and good reason to accept, the minimal conception of innateness in cognitive science

Book Review: Meeting of Minds: Intellectual and Religious Interaction in East Asian Traditions of Thought

Meeting of Minds: Intellectual and Religious Interaction in East Asian Traditions of Thought, a volume of eleven essays written in honor of Wing-tsit Chan and William Theodore de Bary, proposes to explore how Confucian and Neo-Confucian traditions have responded to and have influenced other traditions (Buddhist, Taoist, folk, Japanese nativist, and so on) in China and Japan. The essays are arranged first geographically (seven articles on China precede four on Japan) and then roughly chronologically. All essays, save one, describe Sung or post-Sung developments. A few sentences per essay must suffice in this review. [excerpt

Did social cognition evolve by cultural group selection?

Abstract Cognitive gadgets puts forward an ambitious claim: language, mindreading, and imitation evolved by cultural group selection. Defending this claim requires more than Heyes' spirited and effective critique of nativist claims. The latest human “cognitive gadgets,” such as literacy, did not spread through cultural group selection. Why should social cognition be different? The book leaves this question pending. It also makes strong assumptions regarding cultural evolution: it is moved by selection rather than transformation; it relies on high-fidelity imitation; it requires specific cognitive adaptations to cultural learning. Each of these assumptions raises crucial yet unaddressed difficulties

Mimicking news: how the credibility of an established tabloid is used when disseminating racism

This article explores the mimicking of tabloid news as a form of covert racism, relying on the credibility of an established tabloid newspaper. The qualitative case study focuses on a digital platform for letters to the editor, operated without editorial curation pre-publication from 2010 to 2018 by one of Denmark's largest newspapers, Ekstra Bladet. A discourse analysis of the 50 most shared letters to the editor on Facebook shows that nativist, far-right actors used the platform to disseminate fear-mongering discourses and xenophobic conspiracy theories, disguised as professional news and referred to as articles. These processes took place at the borderline of true and false as well as racist and civil discourse. At this borderline, a lack of supervision and moderation coupled with the openness and visual design of the platform facilitated new forms of covert racism between journalism and user-generated content