In her examination of By the Sea (2001), a novel by Tanzanian author Agdulrazak Gurnah, Professor Carolyn Ownbey argues that in the face of what Wendy Brown terms “the effects of waning state sovereignty on the psychic-political desires, anxieties, and needs of late modern subjects,” By the Sea demonstrates both the permeability of hard borders and the arbitrariness of state hospitality. The novel makes clear that while conditional hospitality may have the appearance of fulfilling human rights obligations, it remains exclusionary and effectively at the will and whim of states and state agents. Gurnah critiques the exclusionary impulses of racist governments and corrupt government officials and offers instead alternative modes of affiliation as ancillary to or in place of traditional, state-sanctioned citizenship.
Questioning the ethico-political stakes of empathy as a gateway to hospitality, Professor Saumya Lal examines the 2003 novel A Distant Shore, by Caribbean author Caryl Phillips. Professor Lal draws on Derrida’s theorization of conditional and unconditional hospitality to suggest that the novel shows how empathy functions as a facilitator of conditional hospitality that holds impossible conditions, even though empathy is utilized to gesture toward unconditional hospitality in (neo)liberal humanitarian discourses. The novel ultimately suggests that the inherent incompleteness of empathy makes it an impossible condition for hospitality.
Exploring the vexed status of the enemy in plays by Lebanese-Canadian writer Wajdi Mouawad, Professor Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller uses Albert Camus’s advocacy for an ethic of hospitality in The Guest, examining how the etymological complexity of “hospitality” — which connotes both adversary (hostile) and host — shapes characters in Ode to the Enemy and Birds of a Kind. Mouawad’s demand for hospitality finds expression in a pivotal event in September 2017 at the Théâtre de la Colline, where Israeli writer David Grossman was invited by Wajdi Mouawad. Grossman embodies both the welcomed guest, owing to his shared Mediterranean heritage, and the perceived adversary due to Lebanon’s historical conflict with Israel. This convergence of perspectives encapsulates what Camus termed the “pensée de midi,” a philosophical and aesthetic framework that confronts the world’s tumultuous realities.
Finally, Professor Pelin Kivrak brings these questions to bear in her Derridean reading of hospitality in HBO’s critically acclaimed social satire The White Lotus. Analyzing the ethical complexities of hospitality within the quasi-private sphere of hotel rooms through the analytical lens of Derrida's 2000 essay "Hostipitality,” Professor Kivrak examines the series’ portrayal of generosity and hospitality across different generations and social strata. Using Robbie Moore's view of hotel representations as symbols of modernity, where “new forms of association and subjectivity generated within corporate space” come into contact with intimate experiences that transcend mere “character,” taking into consideration elements such as architecture and technology, Professor Kivrak’s reading converses with Emma Short's idea of the hotel as a societal microcosm, tracing the evolution of the “hotel genre” in literature to contemporary narratives that reflect the cultural and political tensions of their times.
Together, these papers revitalize the notion of hospitality through a number of provocative thematic and formal strategies in a variety of texts and genres across continents. The panelists are at different stages of their careers and come from a range of institutions. Adding nuance to current theorizations about migration, deterritorialized citizenship, and our relationship to distant Others, this comparative panel seeks to conceptualize new ways of understanding what Derrida calls “doing the impossible,” in which through the double law of hospitality one must “calculate the risks, yes, but without closing the door on the incalculable, that is, on the future and the foreigner.”