Abstract

Notions of hospitality and issues of receiving migrants and refugees have been highlighted in the political rhetoric and various critical and literary approaches. The concept of hospitality is rooted in the interactions, or non-actions between both the host and the guest, and is tied to relational dynamics of knowledge and power. As Michel Foucault states, “there is no power relation without the correlative construction of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 27). Power is generated in relation to the Other; one member has power when the other lacks. Therefore, knowledge and lack of knowledge can be considered as actions, since they constitute what pushes and pulls the actors in the host situation.

When this knowledge is linguistic, or takes on characteristics of speech acts, it in turn holds a space of its own and shakes up the rules of engagement between a host and guest, and poses the following questions: How are hospitality roles formed among the migrants, or Others themselves? Are the notions of oppression and control, both physically and ideologically, addressed in terms of an internal code—or code switching—among the guests themselves? Is there a push and pull connected to a ‘host of hosts’ identity? And can ‘hospitable violence’ be understood by linguistic means? And finally, how does the maternal pathos emerge to be the strongest (linguistic) actor against a patriarchal host-figure? The answers to these questions rest on an analysis at the intersection of Michel Foucault’s theories of knowledge and power, Teun van Dijk and Norman Fairclough’s developments in critical discourse analysis, as well as De Certeau’s concepts of language space.

In Junot Díaz’ This is How You Lose Her, and Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, the concept of linguistic space helps demonstrate the interplay of different occupied spaces throughout the stories, at the same time that it uncovers overarching themes of knowledge, power, and oppression. In both collections, migrant families must come to terms with occupying a different type of spatiality; one that is both of the physical and the non-physical, a geographic reality and a verbal reality. In The House on Mango Street, those who “No Speak English” are reduced to occupying the bottom rung of society, and in “Invierno,” speaking English is seen as the key to gaining access to the outside world. And, in both collections, a mother-figure becomes a prisoner in different apartments because of linguistic barriers. Figures alluding to a ‘hosted host’ identity permeate both collections, as there are actors among the guest groups that take on a Gatekeeper role, and passage through the gate becomes a driving force among the characters. Norman Fairclough (2010) develops this notion of access and power, and assigns a conceptual function to those who control this discoursal access. The powerful enactors, or “Gatekeepers,” are the ones that have control over the flux of knowledge and access to discourse (47). The idea of ‘power behind discourse’ posits that the whole social order of discourse is constructed and maintained as a hidden effect of power in that discourses depend on special knowledge and skills which have to be learned (19-68). Key players in the collections observe that the lack of language creates a powerlessness, but that the ability to pass through planes of linguistic space will give them power.