Chapter 2 Hospitality from Below? Native Americans in the Host-Guest Binary
In: The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and CultureSearch for other papers by Puspa Damai in
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Abstract
A non-Western immigrant seeking or receiving hospitality in the metropolitan centers of the West is a paradigm that dominates contemporary discourses on hospitality. Jacques Derrida tweaked this paradigm by adding to the category of the immigrant-guest a variety of new figures including the homeless or stateless asylum seekers, foreigners, exiles, nomads, and refugees. Though Derrida deconstructs the host-guest binary, still the West in his scheme of things occupies the place of the host. Gayatri Spivak traces a different law of hospitality which she calls “hospitality from below” according to which a colonized subject acts as host to a colonizer guest. This postcolonial view on hospitality apotheosizes a figure she calls a resident alien—a figure invisible in the immigrant model of hospitality championed both by the thinkers of multiculturalism and deconstruction.
Using Spivak’s notion of hospitality from below as its point of departure, this essay examines the place of Native America in the guest-host binary. It studies three novels dealing with the challenges faced by Native Americans in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century America: The Life and Adventure of Joaquin Murieta (1854); Ceremony (1977); and Flight (2007).
While this paper follows Spivak in tracing the notion of hospitality from below in these three novels, it also interrogates Spivak’s anthropocentric premises that flipping the roles and reinstating the colonized as host would be more hospitable, and it would constitute some form of decolonization. It argues that all three Native American novels mimic the immigrant/refugee model of hospitality. They depict hospitality from below not because Native Americans act as hosts, but because a more immanent form of hospitality of contiguity, cosmopolitanism, and planetarity emerges from these narratives.