Introducció: unwelcome “Guests”, unwilling “Hosts”: rethinking hospitality through the culture, literature, and thought of contemporary US women of color

Oliver Rotger, Maria Antonia

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1344/Lectora2023.29.1

Introducció: unwelcome “Guests”, unwilling “Hosts”: rethinking hospitality through the culture, literature, and thought of contemporary US women of color

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Oliver-Rotger MA. Introducció: unwelcome “Guests”, unwilling “Hosts”: rethinking hospitality through the culture, literature, and thought of contemporary US women of color. Lectora: revista de dones i textualitat. 2023;(29):9-18. DOI: 10.1344/Lectora2023.29.1

Abstract

In their reconsiderations of hospitality through the thought and artistic practice of women of color, the contributions in this special issue rely heavily on historical memory, testimony, storytelling, affective politics, and decolonial phenomenology and epistemology. Given the mismatch between a humanistic, almost old-fashioned discourse of hospitality and the secular use of the word in the service business, the essays demonstrate a renewed interest in hospitality as a figuration of ethics and a critique of its practical and discursive contradictions: between a legally confirmed identity and the encounter with the unknown, between the unlimited responsibility toward a guest and gendered and racialized economic relations, between justice and fairness and essentialist views of the other (McNulty, 2007: viii).