Welcoming Strangers: Hospitality In American Literature and Culture.

Abstract

“Welcoming Strangers” explores the question of hospitality in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literary studies. It deploys the concept of hospitality as an analytical category to critique discourses of empire, and demonstrates how hospitality makes it possible to envision and theorize the politics and ethics of decolonization. By exploring scenes of welcome among diverse ethnic “arrivants,” Indigenous Americans, and African Americans, who engage in constantly shifting guest-host relationships, this dissertation subverts a prevalent assumption that the mythical view of America as the Promised Land represents the sole discourse of hospitality. Following an autobiographical vignette in Nepal, where a Peace Corps volunteer ushers in American culture and language, its subsequent chapters examine multiple sites of hospitality in James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, John Dominis Holt, Leslie Marmon Silko, Willa Cather, and Toni Morrison. A radically alternative figure of hospitality – the “guest/host-stranger” – compels us to re-examine these texts not in terms of promoting an abstract form of reception, but in terms of transformative and decolonizing sites of hospitality. Scenes of hospitality in nineteenth-century texts by Cooper, Melville, Sigourney and Whitman register central contradictions of imperial expansion – the slavery that made possible the wealth and territorial expansion, the genocide and dispossession of native peoples, and the anxiety about what that expansion required—namely, proximity to “cannibal” hosts. Twentieth-century texts by Cather, Silko, Holt and Morrison reveal anxieties about the violent remaking of self and reclaiming of history by Native Americans, Hawaiians, African Americans and immigrants. “Welcoming Strangers” moves from Whitman’s poetics of hospitality as containment towards Sigourney’s self-lacerating hermeneutics, Cooper’s “tearing” of selves to produce the affects of welcome and the unsettling exposure of Melville’s cannibal hospitality. Silko’s welcoming healers, Holt’s revenants welcoming their history, Cather’s “un-furnished” hospitality, and the spectral welcome in Morrison intensify the ambivalent hospitality of the guest/host-stranger, who at once exposes the estrangement of imperialism and ushers in the promise of decolonization. By shifting our focus from the critique of national subjectivity and empire to a model at whose center stand the welcoming strangers, possibilities of national identity emerge beyond the binaries of host-guest or colonizer-colonized.