Extending Hospitality: Giving Space, Taking Time (Paragraph Special Issues)

How we handle strangers is at once a question of profound ethical significance and practical and political necessity. The current interest in the concept of hospitality revives philosophical themes associated with Levinas, Derrida, and other philosophers in the context of new mobilities and institutionalized practices. Much critical work, especially in the social sciences, assumes a congruence between otherness or estrangement and the crossing of borders and boundaries. But is there more at stake? Extending Hospitality brings together philosophy, geography, anthropology, sociology, and literary and cultural studies to explore the interface between ethical ideals and worldly demands. The collection engages with different ways people have become estranged and the spacing and timing of encounters between guests and hosts, as well as the tensions between institutionalized and unconditional welcoming, the relationship between human finitude and political abjection, and the gendered expectations of hospitality.