Ghosts, Guests, Hosts: Rethinking “Illegal” Migration and Hospitality Through Arab Diasporic Literature

This article analyses Helon Habila’s Travellers (2019), focusing on its depiction of African migrants in Europe as strangers, as defined by Sara Ahmed in Strange Encounters (2000): those who, in spite of their proximity, are recognized as not belonging or out of place. Following Ahmed, this essay deals with the relation between space and migrant experience in Habila’s novel, in which the configuration of cities such as Berlin and London and of Europe as a whole is presented as characterized by the enforcement of boundaries and spaces of belonging (Ahmed, 2000), so that the African stranger emerges as an undesirable, threatening, foreign element to be feared and expelled. On the other hand, such a logic of defensiveness, homogeneity, and exclusion is partly challenged and undermined in Travellers by acts of resistance carried out by both African and European characters and by acts of domestic hospitality. These acts suggest the disruption of frontiers and borders, and their corresponding sealed and homogeneous spaces (Ahmed, 2000), together with the necessity of exercising hospitality at a collective and political level. As opposed to the configuration of Europe as Fortress Europe, in which identity and community are defined in terms of affiliation to roots, homeland, or race, in Travellers we find thus an appeal to what Jacques Derrida has called the “democracy to come”, a political, always deferred space of unconditional hospitality that opens up to the foreigner and the stranger.

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De-imperializing Gender

Segall¹

2019

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

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In Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits Laila Lalami writes about a clandestine crossing from Morocco to Spain. Within this story she reveals the effects of this crossing on the changing religious beliefs of her two central female characters. While a probing critique notes how she tends to an analysis of the agency of these immigrants, there is little reference by Lalami to their religious identifiers. This is not an omission but a literary strategy suggesting that religious liaisons form venues of challenge and agency in Islamist revivals. Since faith practices are viewed differently by the women, and by the characters that surround them, these gaps illuminate the contradictions between how women view themselves and how others perceive them. Given how stereotypes of religion have emerged out of a history of colonization, these women’s personal journeys reject structures of entrapment and reductionism, resisting essentialist representations of women and Islam in unexpected ways.

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Ghosts, Guests, Hosts: Rethinking “Illegal” Migration and Hospitality Through Arab Diasporic Literature

Cited by 22 publications

References 17 publications

Sex and love as routes for border crossing and homing desire in anglophone Lebanese fiction

Sex and love as routes for border crossing and homing desire in anglophone Lebanese fiction

African strangers, spaces of belonging and the “democracy to come” in Helon Habila’s Travellers

De-imperializing Gender

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