Book Review - Ash Amin <em>After Nativism: Belonging in an Age of Intolerance</em>

How do we rebuild a public sphere, unruly and fragmented as it must be, as a meeting place of multiple forms of togetherness, to ward against the most hateful and anti-democratic tendencies of the digital public sphere?This is one of the questions Ash Amin asks in his timely new book, After Nativism (2023: 5) -a guidebook to a myriad ways of imagining community in shared futures beyond the insularity, violence and racism of populist nationalism.What is nativism?Whilst it may take many forms, it 'thrives on claiming that the 'people' have been abandoned by a detached liberal or social democracy serving elite and 'anywhere' interests ' (2023: 21).True to form, Amin moves seamlessly across disciplines, and digs deeply into the survival stories of the urban poor, to present us with a euphony of concepts that may yield alternatives to populism.As in his other books (Amin and Thrift, 2002, 2017;Amin, 2012), Amin unfurls several of his images, concepts and ideas from a fragment about everyday life, Consider the following examples of 'plural geographies of attachment': a form of belonging based on 'cooccupancy and encounter'; 'hybrid kinships and rhizomatic connections' between humans, animals and plants.Then imagine the nation formed less around a sense of shared identity of values and more as 'a compromise of overlapping interests and shared practices', 'a space of conciliations', or 'zone of engagement'.This is only a small sample of the plethora of terms, images and concepts on offer in the book.Across four chapters, an Introduction and Coda, this book squarely faces the challenge of rising nativist nationalism, and asks what kind of political movements and understandings of citizenship, can be attractive, relevant and robust enough to form a counternarrative of belonging.