cfp.english.upenn.edu

There is no custom of hospitality here, we do not need guests.’
--Kafka The Castle

The ethics of Hospitality is embedded with the politics of national and foreign diplomacy in Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace Treaty (1798) in which he puts forth the hypothesis that the extension of this action is not of one related to philanthropy, but of one related to right. Jacques Derrida further defines this ‘right’ proposed by Kant as one ‘in relation to citizenship, the state, the subject of the state’ going so far as to declare that it is an ‘international right’ (Derrida 3).

This session discusses hospitality that addresses literature in a transnational and cosmopolitan context. Issues of hospitality are related to ideas of cultural learning, exchange, as well as contrarily, issues of discomfort and hostility.

Please email all proposals before March 21st.
email contact: Melissa Lam mlam@cuhk.edu.hk