Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture : Modern and Contemporary Perspectives

This book opens a dialogue between discourses of security and hospitality in modern and contemporary literature and culture. Essays span domestic spaces and detention camps, the experience of migration and tourism, interpersonal exchanges, and cross-cultural interventions. Demonstrating an interrelation between discussions of hospitality and the intensifying attention to security concerns, the book visits a global range of literary, cultural, and geopolitical contexts. Via the key themes of uncertainty, domesticity, and transit, this volume defines a new interdisciplinary area of inquiry that resonates with interests in world literature, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism.

With contributions from an international array of scholars, this volume opens a dialogue between discourses of security and hospitality in modern and contemporary literature and culture. The chapters in the volume span domestic spaces and detention camps, the experience of migration and the phenomena of tourism, interpersonal exchanges and cross-cultural interventions. The volume explores the multifarious ways in which subjects, citizens, communities, and states negotiate the mutual, and potentially exclusive, desires to secure themselves and offer hospitality to others. From the individual’s telephone and data, to the threshold of the family home, to the borders of the nation, sites of securitization confound hospitality’s injunction to openness, gifting, and refuge. In demonstrating an interrelation between ongoing discussions of hospitality and the intensifying attention to security, the book engages with a range of literary, cultural, and geopolitical contexts, drawing on work from other disciplines, including philosophy, political science, and sociology. Further, it defines a new interdisciplinary area of inquiry that resonates with current academic interests in world literature, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism.