This book addresses the paucity of robust reflections on ethics as a distinct field of experience in recent Black Studies scholarship. Following the intervention of the Afro-Pessimist school of thought--spearheaded by the likes of Frank Wilderson III and Jared Sexton--there has been much needed attention brought to the totalizing nature of Black political degradation and vulnerability in America. However, an in depth reflection on the ethical implications of this political positionality is lacking and in places even implied to not be possible. Black Hospitality conceptualizes what the author argues is the aporetic experience of Black ethical life as both excessively vulnerable within and yet also ultimately hostile to an anti-black political ontology. Engaging the work of scholars such as Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Nahum Chandler, Jacques Derrida, Theodor Adorno, and Toni Morrison, along with the concepts of fugitivity, Black sociality, im-possibility, and paraontology, Black Hospitality insists that Black ethical life provides a necessary broadening of the contours of Black experience.
This book asks how an unconditional welcome to strangers is both challenged and made possible by new digital technologies, machine learning, and human-computer interaction (HCI). It argues that the digital - the advancement of data, the proliferation of machines (embodied or not) in our homes and on our screens, and the millions of lines of code that organize and predict our lives - is not the absence of hospitality but rather the beginning, though not without its challenges. While such an ethic remains more important than ever, The Digital Future of Hospitality updates this enduring philosophical imperative for digital times. Through the lens of cultural studies, intersectional feminism, and posthumanism, this book reanimates hospitality in relation to a series of digital texts that are relevant to the twenty-first century and beyond - android figures on television, virtual domestic assistants, home- and ride-sharing apps, wearable devices, and a renewed cultural obsession with viruses and immunity.
Feminism and Hospitality: Gender in the Host/Guest Relationship, edited by Maurice Hamington, is the first collection of original works to bring a feminist analysis to issues and theories of personal, political, economic, and artistic hospitality. Themes within the anthology include theoretical, domestic, international, commercial, and literary representations of hospitality. An impressive array of North American and international scholars employ multidisciplinary approaches to diverse aspects of hospitality with specific reflection on the significance of gender.
This unique study explores the vampire as host and guest, captor and hostage: a perfect lover and force of seductive predation. From Dracula and Carmilla, to True Blood and The Originals, the figure of the vampire embodies taboos and desires about hospitality, rape and consent. The first section welcomes the reader into ominous spaces of home, examining the vampire through concepts of hospitality and power, the metaphor of threshold, and the blurred boundaries between visitation, invasion and confinement. Section two reflects upon the historical development of vampire narratives and the monster as oppressed, alienated Other. Section three discusses cultural anxieties of youth, (im)maturity, childhood agency, abuse and the age of consent. The final section addresses vampire as intimate partner, mapping boundaries between invitation, passion and coercion. With its fresh insight into vampire genre, this book will appeal to academics, students and general public alike.
A groundbreaking examination of a crucial concept in Islamic thought and tradition from an author noted for her work on interfaith and intercultural dialogue Considering its prominent role in many faith traditions, surprisingly little has been written about hospitality within the context of religion, particularly Islam. In her new book, Mona Siddiqui, a well-known media commentator, makes the first major contribution to the understanding of hospitality both within Islam and beyond. She explores and compares teachings within the various Muslim traditions over the centuries, while also drawing on materials as diverse as Islamic belles lettres, Christian reflections on almsgiving and charity, and Islamic and Western feminist writings on gender issues. Applying a more theological approach to the idea of mercy as a fundamental basis for human relationships, this book will appeal to a wide audience, particularly readers interested in Islam, ethics, and religious studies.
This volume examines hospitality in American immigrant literature and culture, situating this ancient virtue at the crossroads of space and border theory, and exploring the relationship among the intersecting themes of migration, citizenship, identity formation, and spatiality. Assessing the conditions, duration, and shifting roles of hosts and guests in the United States, the book concentrates on the ways the US administers protocols of belonging and non-belonging, and distinguishes between those who can feel at home from those who will always be outside the body politic, even if they were the original "hosts."
The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and Culture explores hospitality in a range of cultural expressions from a variety of approaches. The authors analyze and discuss forms of hospitality in canonical literature, ethnic literatures, language or movies. These span from the classical to the contemporary and include a focus on language, power, hybridism, and sociology. The common theme in these contributions is that of American identity. By looking at a diversity of representations of American culture, using a multiplicity of approaches, the authors convey the richness of American hospitality as a vital aspect of its culture.
In recent years, hospitality has emerged as a category in French thinking for addressing a range of issues associated with immigration and other types of journeys. Rosello's book concentrates primarily on France and its former colonies in North and sub-Saharan Africa and considers how hospitality and its dissidence are defined, practiced, and represented in European and African fictions, theories, and myths at the end of the twentieth century. Postcolonial Hospitality explores the ways in which Western superpowers rewrite ideals of hospitality that are borrowed from a variety of sources and that sometimes constitute an incompatible system of values.Each chapter focuses on a problematic moment when hospitality is read either as excessive or lacking: when the host does not give what is ideally expected; when the guest is mistreated rather than protected; when the guest abuses the host rather than being grateful. In considering these issues, the author examines the relationship between ownership and generosity, focusing specifically on the connections among nationalism, immigration, and hospitality. Because the intersections between cultural differences and issues of gender often expose the fragility or arbitrariness of hospitable conventions, the author studies novels, films, and immigrant interviews that explore those moments of crisis when systems of hospitality clash.
This volume focuses on hospitality as a theoretically and historically crucial phenomenon in Shakespeare's work with ramifications for contemporary thought and practice. Drawing a multifaceted picture of Shakespeare's scenes of hospitality--with their numerous scenes of greeting, feeding, entertaining, and sheltering--the collection demonstrates how hospitality provides a compelling frame for the core ethical, political, theological, and ecological questions of Shakespeare's time and our own. By reading Shakespeare's plays in conjunction with contemporary theory as well as early modern texts and objects--including almanacs, recipe books, husbandry manuals, and religious tracts -- this book reimagines Shakespeare's playworld as one charged with the risks of hosting (rape and seduction, war and betrayal, enchantment and disenchantment) and the limits of generosity (how much can or should one give the guest, with what attitude or comportment, and under what circumstances?). This substantial volume maps the terrain of Shakespearean hospitality in its rich complexity, demonstrating the importance of historical, rhetorical, and phenomenological approaches to this diverse subject.