Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean
Résumé
Hospitality is a complex concept whose etymology foregrounds an aporia. Derived from hostis, the foreigner and potential enemy, the hospes or host welcomes the guest, implying an intricate relationship between receiver and received, insider and outsider, as well as a compensatory relation since both hospes and hostis derive from the Latin verb hostire: “to treat as equal,” “to compensate,” “to pay back.” With contributions from leading contemporary thinkers on hospitality Fabienne Brugère and Guillaume Le Blanc; Mediterranean poets and scholars Margherita Orsino and Norbert Bugeja; and an incisive intervention by Mediterranean aesthetician John Baldacchino, Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean posits Mediterranean hospitality as a paradoxical concept that iteratively re-members its participants, providing them with new and constantly re/negotiated tools for creation, survival, and subversion within the historical situatedness of Mediterranean exchange. Engaging migration studies, environmental studies, decolonial studies, ecocriticism and ecopoetics, philosophy, history, cultural studies, and literary studies, Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean brings together leading voices ranging from early-career to established scholars across the social sciences and the humanities to argue for a distinct focus on the Mediterranean pre/conditions and pre/histories of hospitality. As it engages and undoes the complex knot of hospitality surrounding Jacques Derrida and René Schérer, and counters them with Mediterranean thinkers like Franco Cassano, Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean fans out to a wide range of critical interpretative practices specific to the Mediterranean, including: contemporary European politics and identity formation against the backdrop of Mediterranean migration; religious practices of pilgrimage and refuge within the longue durée of Mediterranean ritual; transcolonial and migratory identifications with the Mediterranean across the African continent; the turn in Anglophone literature to Mediterranean places and spaces as sites for non-normative social, sexual, and gender formations; and historical accounts of the colonial Mediterranean.
Methodologically, Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean bridges an important gap in Mediterranean Studies. While an important and growing number of publications in the 21st century have taken the modern and contemporary Mediterranean as their locus of inquiry, few have taken up the simultaneously wide and focused sweep of Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean, in which each chapter methodically addresses the longue durée of one specific historical and aesthetic concept. The book’s focus on the embodied praxis of hospitality—whether in the guise of the ritual modes of religious history, the literary page, the visual arts, even dystopic narratives of the future and the realpolitik of shelter and asylum—moves beyond dominant transit tropes of aporetic exchange (in the lineage of Derrida). Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean offers instead a fractal view of Mediterranean studies as inflected by the lived, aesthetic, and philosophical histories of hospitality. To date, there has been no interdisciplinary intervention that takes up hospitality as a starting point to critical thinking about Mediterranean studies as an expansive, dynamic, and ever-evolving discipline. Against the inescapable backdrop of necropolitics and catastrophe, Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean offers a rich, agentive alternative for Mediterranean worldmaking.