Re-membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean, Toulouse, March 26–27, 2020
Proposals are sought for the forthcoming “Re-membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean” International Conference convened by Yasser Elhariry, Isabelle Keller-Privat, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev that will be held on March 26-27, 2020 in Toulouse, France (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès).
Hospitality is a complex, paradoxical 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” (Grassi 35). The foreigner shifts from the position of an endangered, alienated subject to one who is included within the protective folds of the polis and the home. In welcoming the other, the host not only shares his home and power, but also entitles the guest (if only temporarily) to his own power as despot—etymologically, “the master of the house who lays down the laws of hospitality” (Derrida 149)—while reasserting his own domination. As a result, the commutative essence of the relationship between host and guest—whereby, as René Schérer argues, the host “acknowledges, through and thanks to the figure of the guest, his own exilic self” (40)—is perpetually jeopardized. In Claude Raffestin’s formulation, “hospitality is a right that warrants the transgression of limits without entailing violence” (166; qtd. Grassi 23).
Papers may focus on the displacement and resemanticization of Mediterranean and Biblical narratives of hospitality in Anglophone literature and the arts. The Mediterranean may also be envisaged as a locus of displaced, unexpected hospitality for early modernist female writers. Anglophone writers taking shelter in the Mediterranean also experience the “limits of difficulty” in the hospitality they are granted: an indomitable sense of estrangement lies at the heart of a new belonging, notably in works that contribute to the re-membering of a hospitality that is constantly endangered. The specific locations of hospitality—pilgrims’ hospitals, hospices, convents, and, later on, hostels and hotels—also play an important role in the narratives redefining the contours of the Mediterranean, where early travelers navigated between hostility and hospitality, and where modern ones often stand out as precarious guests. The hospitality that writers and artists have sought, received, and rebuilt on Mediterranean shores, particularly in the tightly woven artist colonies that spanned the Near and Middle Easts in the twentieth century, may also be envisaged as a hermeneutic tool for the critique of our present-day “sick hospitality” (Manzanas Calvo and Benito Sánchez 107). From that perspective, the Mediterranean may be considered as the locus of a newly founded commonality whereby, as Andrew Benjamin argues, “centrality would be attributed to relationality. Being-in-common […] marks the primordiality of relationality, and thus what counts as human being needs to be incorporated within a relational ontology” (29).
Historical, mythological, ethnographic, visual, literary, cinematic, and intermedial approaches are all welcome provided that they define and articulate a concept of hospitality, its relation with memory, and the confrontations and reunions that substantiate the emergence and deployment of new forms of commonality within the Mediterranean space.
A selection of papers will be published in an edited volume in the wake of the conference.