Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture ─ Modern and Contemporary Perspectives

With contributions from an international array of scholars, this volume opens a dialogue between discourses of security and hospitality in modern and contemporary literature and culture. Essays span domestic spaces and detention camps, the experience of migration and the phenomena of tourism, interpersonal exchanges, and cross-cultural interventions. The volume explores the multifarious ways in which subjects, citizens, communities, and states negotiate the mutual, and potentially exclusive, desires to secure themselves and offer hospitality to others. From the individual's telephone and data, to the threshold of the family home, to the borders of the nation, sites of securitization confound hospitality's injunction to openness, gifting, and refuge. Demonstrating an interrelation between the ongoing discussion of hospitality and the intensifying attention to security concerns, the book engages with a global range of literary, cultural, and geopolitical contexts. Organized around the key themes of uncertainty, domesticity, and transit, essays draw on work from other disciplines including philosophy, international relations, political science, and sociology. Aimed at the emerging body of scholars working in the areas of hospitality and security studies, this volume defines a new interdisciplinary area of inquiry that resonates with current academic interests in world literature, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism.

Jeffrey Clapp is a Lecturer in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. His recent work is available in the journalsTextual Practice and Partial Answers.

Emily Ridge is a Lecturer in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. Her work has been published inJourneys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing,Modernism/Modernity, Textual Practice, and Katherine Mansfield Studies.