Hospitality beyond Good and Bad
Hospitality beyond Good and Bad
This chapter on the concept and practice of hospitality goes back to the time around the millennium and the first years of the New Labour government. It takes a novel – Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good – as its object of analysis. The chapter is about identity, inclusion and exclusion, but it is more about ‘us’ (White, liberal middle-class, etc.) than about those marked as exotic others, those whom multiculturalism is usually taken to be about. Through an analysis of the novel’s treatment of hospitality and charity, the chapter shows how a certain liberal subjectivity is central to the scene of British multiculturalism. As with equality, recognition and tolerance, hospitality is always caught in a tension between unconditionality and conditionality, between openness and closure. The chapter uses Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and his work on hospitality and the gift as its theoretical basis.
Keywords: exclusion, gift, homelessness, hospitality, inclusion, Jacques Derrida, liberalism, Nick Hornby
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