Saturday, October 31th 1:00 – 2:30

Session Room: Loft 2

1) Liza Williams, Brown University
Radical Hospitality and Immigration Protest

This paper develops a new ethic of hospitality for immigrants. The view explains how contestation over membership rights is essential to maintaining democratic integrity and furthering the incorporation of newcomers into political life. The argument suggests how immigrant expression and agency is crucial for the development of liberal democratic principles of inclusion and exclusion.  How should liberal democracies respond to immigrants and other categories of proximate migrants? This paper clarifies arguments behind a cosmopolitan ethic of hospitality and questions methods for developing it within the local-context of democratic constitutional states. I argue against the democratic deficits embodied in Michael Walzer's view of membership rights in Spheres of Justice (1983) as well as Seyla Benhabib’s cosmopolitan-federalist theory of moral membership in The Rights of Others (2004). I theorize how hospitality entails developing the speech of immigrants as a precondition for public justification of membership rights. Immigrants need to be able to appear in public and contest the terms of their membership.  By risking self-transformation, the democratic body-politic helps sustain its own integrity. One advantage of my reinterpretation of hospitality is that it counteracts an assimilationist standard for belonging. A practice of hospitality can help stabilize conditions for democratic pluralism to emerge, establish how self-transformation is a requirement of further democratization, and guide the incorporation of immigrants into the body politic.

2) Connie Kendall Theado, University of Cincinnati
Framing the American Identity: Immigration, Literacy, and Nation-building

Since its inception, the U.S. has been regularly engaged in the narration of its nationality; that is, in the process of defining what it means to be an “American” so that an individual can fully participate in the idea of “America.” The ongoing project of nation-building, then, may be best viewed as a simultaneous construction of both the nation’s identity as well as the idealized identity of its citizenry. There is nothing intrinsically unitary about an identity, national or otherwise. Instead, and as Uri Ram has asserted, it is the narrative process, or the ways in which nations and individuals discursively interpret themselves and each other, that creates the experience of unity and coherence. As such, the production of a national identity is a remarkably tenuous project, fraught with ambiguities, open to revision, and implicated by the competing discourses of the times.

This paper uses Erving Goffman’s theory of frame analysis to situate a rhetorical analysis of three exemplar texts published at the turn of the 20th century, where literacy becomes linked with the ideal American identity through the discursive construction of the Second Wave immigrant as “illiterate” and, thus, as incapable of assimilating into U.S. society. In revealing the interpretive frames used to construct the Second Wave immigrants’ illiteracy as posing a threat to the nation’s economic security and social progress, my analysis also shows how these frames were broken and reframed, over time, and in relation to the rapidly changing political contexts that marked the era. Far from being pre-existent truths, I argue that the linkages established between an immigrant’s possession of literacy and his/her ability to assimilate into the American identity are discursive constructions emerging from this era, a legacy the U.S. yet contends with today.

3) Maria Granic-White, Sam Houston State University

Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hospitality, this essay argues that in the presence of the (mental or physical) other, the self is a transcendental foreigner, the xenos, longing for a feeling of being ‘at home’ and experiencing the various manifestations of the (in)hospitality machine. Charlotte Brontë’s Villette optimally depicts the self as foreigner through its protagonist, Lucy Snowe, a Protestant, ‘redundant woman’ who leaves England and starts a new life in Labassecour, a Catholic country. This examination of Brontë’s narrative centers on Lucy’s stay in Villette at Mme. Beck’s boarding house to illustrate inhospitality, unconditional hospitality, and “ought to” hospitality as forms into which the machine aggregates during the self’s encounter with the other. Through tensions created by religion and language, the first person narrative, a dramatized experience of the quiddity of the self, brings to the forefront complex human emotions. Whereas the other’s ethos of exclusion enhances nationalism, love creates the space of unconditional hospitality and of belonging, the closest that the self can be to the status of non-foreign. In act of reading, the reader becomes the xenos and apprehends laws of (in)hospitality that reinforce her foreignness.