Journal CFP Lectora: Rethinking hospitality through the culture, literature, and thought of contemporary US women of color

deadline for submissions: 
December 15, 2022
full name / name of organization: 
Lectora: Revista de Dones i Textualitat
contact email: 

 

Rethinking hospitality through the culture, literature, and thought of contemporary US women of color  

This dossier will bring together essays that address the transformation of the notion of hospitality through the thought, culture, and literature of contemporary US women of color of the last half of the twentieth century and of the beginning of the twenty-first.  The feminism of women of color has thrown into relief the role of precarious racialized labor in the hospitality industry in a society where civic values and the welfare state are in decline (Collins 2000; Kempadoo 2001; Nilliasca 2011). On the other hand, feminist theories of hospitality have emphasized the ethics of care, mutuality, the central role of affects and the body, and the need to unpack the dynamics of capitalist patriarchy behind the binarism host/guest (Ahmed 2006; Hamington 2010). The current US social and political scenario—affected by migration and deportation, the sanitary crisis and social inequality, by the effects of global capitalism on territories, families, and communities, and by threatened civil rights and liberties—requires rethinking what we understand by hospitality from an intersectional feminist perspective. Working-class women of color experience at different levels of intersectionality (of gender, race, origin, social class, etc.) the contradictions of the binary logic that grounds the discourses of hospitality: They carry out the role of  “hostesses” in the work place, but they rarely see themselves as such given the precarity imposed by their irregular legal status and their precarious labor conditions; their affective and emotional labor as domestic, sexual and service workers has little or no social value, so they cannot see themselves “guests” in a social environment that fosters latch homes and children. They are therefore subjects inhabiting the internalized margins of the nation (Mezzadra y Nelson 2013), upon whose servitude rests the “conditional hospitality” that maintains the gender, race, class, and sexual hierarchies of the alleged “host” nation-sate (Derrida y Dofourmantelle 2000). Women of color may, from these very margins, construct networks of care, mutuality, and hospitality as forms of resilience and subsistence to face vulnerability and helplessness, homes and mutual-help communities that also contest the opposition host/guest (Hill Collins 2000). Through the analysis of several literary manifestations, essays in this dossier may address theoretical perspectives, writing genres and collective imaginaries that result from an awareness of these mechanisms in the literary representation of experiences such as the irregular yet accepted migration and deportation, “disposable” bodies and lives in global capitalism, groups of displaced citizens within the nation state, the practices of care such as motherwork, othermothering, and community othermothering (Collins 2000; Caballero 2019), or the rethinking of the relationship between the host and the guest outside the laws of private property, citizenship, and family, among others.

This dossier will be edited by Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger (Universitat Pompeu

Fabra).

The articles, written in Catalan, Spanish, Galician, Basque, English, French, Italian or

Portuguese, should follow the journal’s style guidelines and be submitted online

before December 15, 2022.

Journal guidelines and information on previous issues are available at:

http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/lectora/index.