All participants are members as of 7 May.
Why, Jennie Germann Molz and Sarah Gibson ask, “are immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers imagined as guests of the host nation-state?” Tahar Ben Jelloun posits, “We already have laws restricting entry and residence; why shouldn’t we have other laws based on the idea that to welcome strangers into one’s country is a fundamental mark of civilization?” These are the kinds of questions that insist upon retheorized responses in our contemporary moment. In recent years, hospitality has been reinvigorated as a vital model for enacting cross-border alliances and anatomizing encounters with mobile others. As Seyla Benhabib puts it, “The universal right to hospitality which is due to every human being imposes upon us an imperfect moral duty to help and offer shelter to those whose life, limb, and well-being are endangered.”
The ethico-political stakes of hospitality are first negotiated at the border, a space that animates the contradictions that Derrida expressed: “To take up the figure of the door, for there to be hospitality there must be a door. But if there is a door, there is no longer hospitality. There is no hospitable house...Hospitality thus becomes the threshold or the door.” This panel examines representations of hospitality for migrants and refugees negotiated in and across border spaces. As the reality of contemporary displacement is so overwhelming it is virtually illegible, this panel considers how narrative can critique the criminalization of the worldwide movement of peoples and resuscitate a commitment to hospitality, in what may seem the most inhospitable of periods.
The papers that have been selected for this panel explore innovative approaches to contemporary border hospitality in literature and film across the globe. Professor Penny Vlagopoulos analyzes Valeria Luiselli’s book inspired by her time as an interpreter for refugee children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, Tell Me How It Ends. Translating—both linguistically for the refugees and narratively for the reader through a deconstructed intake questionnaire—becomes a way of “understanding the unthinkable,” a form of justice. Through an insurgent politics of translation, Professor Vlagopoulos argues, the book enacts a radical hospitality.
How can narrative promote hospitality for those who are internally displaced, a number that exceeds 45 million globally? Juanita Olivera Vélez examines this question in her paper on the works of Colombian poet Piedad Bonnett, which portray internal displacement in Colombia due to violence. By analyzing how Bonnett’s poetry approaches dichotomies of everyday life, she questions how a poem can illuminate the invisible borders within a country that impact the lives of those who are displaced, arguing that the poetic word can become a hospitable borderland space.
The stakes of hospitality at the border extend beyond geopolitical and temporal categories to the Black Atlantic in Professor Éloïse Brezault’s study of Senegalese director Mati Diop’s latest movie, Atlantics (2019). Focusing on the legacy of slavery and immigration between African and Europe through a feminist lens, Professor Brezault explores how the genre of the fantastic is intertwined with the trope of illness to question the criminalization of immigration. Using Simukai Chigudu’s ideas about the dramaturgy of illness, she argues that the literal possession of the bodies of Senegalese women is a subversive metaphor for the relationship between immigration and hospitality in today’s Senegalese society.
Finally, Professor Hande Gurses takes a posthumanist approach by reading the crossing of boundaries between species as a way to explore questions of hospitality in Anuk Arudpragasam’s first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), which depicts the life of Tamil refugees during the Sri Lankan civil war. What does it mean for the refugee to take refuge in animality? In what ways can the animal extend hospitality towards the human? Can the universalism of the animal contribute to the development of a transnational politics for the refugee? Examining these questions, Professor Gurses considers what political and poetic possibilities the novel offers for the figure of the migrant once the inter-species borders have been crossed.
Together, these papers (12-15 minutes each) revitalize the notion of hospitality at the border through a number of provocative thematic and formal strategies in literature and film across continents. Adding nuance to current theorizations of the border and debates about asylum and deterritorialized citizenship, this comparative panel seeks to conceptualize new cosmopolitical communities from below.