Our contemporary globalized world is a network of independences involving cultures, societies, economies: an interrupted flow of ideas, information, (diseases), goods, capital, (waste), computer data, and people. Flowing is exactly the image most apt to describe travelling and movements nowadays: a paradigm that the social sciences call "mobilities" (Urry, 2000). A world on the move, mobile, fluid: business travelers, commuters, tourists and of course migrants, asylum seekers, refugees.
It is against this backdrop that "the question of hospitality" must be reformulated. Or formulated in a different way entirely. Not so much a question of how should we welcome the migrant, the traveler, the other (a question that can be traced all the way to ancient Greece), but instead: who is the traveler in question? How are some migrants different from other migrants? In what space does the encounter with the other happen? Question, then, in the plural.
At the root of the issue is of course the problem of defining hospitality in and of itself, whether it is politically or ethically negotiated. The Kant vs Derrida debate is still relevant today: it insert itself right in the middle of national and international policies in regard to the surge of war refugees and asylum seekers. Do we house refugees because we are politically compelled to or because it is ethnically correct that we do so?
Kant's law of "universal hospitality" formulated in Towards Perpetual Peace, while establishing an important relationship between mobility and hospitality, strictly juridical and political: conceive as a system to avoid wars and hostility, it is also subjected to legal restrictions on the border-crossers. But a limited hospitality - an hospitality linked to political expediency - can only be partial, compromised, imperfect; thus not truly hospitality. Derrida's formulation of unconditional and hospitality is equally problematic: it means that sovereignty over borders and territories must be relinquishe by the nation-state. It means, on a domestic level, that the master of the house opening the door to a new visitor must he himself become a tenant, a guest in his own home: only by giving up ownership of the house, of the shard place, can he truly put himself on the same level of the visitor, and unconditionally welcome him.
Derrida's is purposely provocative in raising the issue of the relation between the self and the other when hospitality is given and accepted, in subverting the power relation existing between host and guest. Can we, from the safety of our homes and countries, truly be sympathetic towards the rootless, the exiled, those people who have been expelled, deported? Is opening our doors and our borders enough to welcome "the displaced and the dispossessed"? Or should we instead put into question our own positions within the space in which hospitality is negotiated? Unconditional hospitality cannot find a realistic legal formulation. Still, it is a concept that invites us to think beyond the juridical modalities and the political programs through which immigration and citenzship are regulated.
An ethics of hospitality also dismantles binary oppositions built around the figures of the host and the guest - stasis/movement, stability/uncertainty - and goes towards a fluid, mobile representation. Why do guest and host need to be thought as such unmovable categories to begin with? Many immigrants are employed in seasonal jobs within the tourist industry and might have to welcome holiday-makers to a country that it is not their own. Or, the other way around, migrants might go back to visit their home countries and be welcomed as tourists. Social interactions too are on the move, and therefore need to be re-conceptualized as temporal performances rather than as stable unmovable identities. European colonizers were the first to overturn the guest/host paradigm, by taking possession of a land ("other people's home") and transforming themselves from guests to hosts. Yet, nowadays it is the immigrant the one placed under a debt of hospitality to the host country.
Imagining immigrants as being permanently "the guests" is of course damaging as it perpetuates narrow-minded discourses of national attachments and power relations. But it also inscribes them into unnaturally fixed categories. Should not the migrant be able to move across categories as he moves across borders? If the stranger is the “person who comes today and stays tomorrow” (Simmel 1950: 402), then migration is about stasis just as much as it is about movement.
Unless it radically is not. Unless we accept the formula belonging equals gravity, as Rushdie would have it. In that case, the migrant would be the one with absolutely no roots, gravity; destine to float upwards, away from Earth, towards outer space.
There seems to be then, in being a migrant, a tension between opposites - stasis and movement, dwelling and travelling, gravity and anti-gravity - that needs to be mediated, needs to be fluid. It is this tension that we must keep in mind to negotiate hospitality in our contemporary world of mobilities.
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| The Arrival by Shaun Tan, a wordless graphic novel published in 2007 |
| "[The Arrival] is the story, told through brilliant visual imagery, of any refugee, migrant, l'étranger or displaced person leaving a homeland to make a new life in a strange land"
NSW Premier's Literary Awards, 2007
A book about universal migration with an everyday man who goes through the experience of any or all human beings forced into leaving their homeland and their loved ones. A book about leaving homelands and meetings strangers; about hospitality and hostility, departures and reunifications. There is clearly sadness at leaving one's family, for a time, but significantly, the book is called The Arrival, not 'The Departure'. The man is helped by the kindness of strangers: he is given food and shelter and eventually finds a job. He makes friends and shares his story. The outcome of his journey is reunification with the wife and child he left behind.
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Martina Cincotto
Works Cited
- Kant, I. (1795) Perpetual Peace
- Derrida, J., Dufourmantelle A. (2000) Of Hospitality, Stanford University Press
- Simmel, G (1950) The Stranger
- Urry, J. (2007) Mobilities. Polity.
- Rushdie S. (2011) Shame, Random House
- Tan, S. (2007) The Arrival Lothian Books
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