Archives of (in)hospitality: a multilingual glossary on the bordering of communities and alternative visions of living-together

Hospitality is evoked in political and philosophical debates about social relations and the ways communities relate to their others: the stranger, the tourist, the (im)migrant, the refugee. Academics within humanities and social sciences have emphasized the link between hospitality and questions related to processes of belonging and exclusion, citizenship, human rights or the treatment of migrants and/or refugees (cf. Derrida 2000a; Rosello 2001; Dikeç 2002; Benhabib 2004; Still 2010; Agier 2018). The present research proposal engages in this ongoing debate, but deploys a particular theoretical approach that seeks to inquire into the lasting effects of modern thought on the organization and institutionalization of anthropological difference in contemporary societies. Working within the realm of comparative literary and cultural studies, this project aims to examine the role of literature and interrelated aesthetic practices in (re)articulating (in)hospitality. Organized as a multilingual glossary, it examines how concepts such as “Postmigration”, “broken language”, “archipels”, “Afropean” or “unlearning” are mobilized and translated by different international writers and thinkers to come to terms with dominant forms of community and envision alternative modes of living together. Explicitly addressing multiple sites of inquiry, it seeks to explore alternative vocabularies and archives – in the sense of depositories of past experiences and epistemological projects – for thinking about community, exclusion and the hierarchization of groups of humans.