This panel at the SAMLA 97 conference (Nov. 5-7, 2026) examines hospitality as a critical framework within postcolonial studies, attending to the ways literary and cultural texts negotiate welcome, refusal, obligation, and exposure in the aftermath of empire. Within empire studies, hospitality emerges as a fraught ethical and aesthetic relation shaped by colonial histories, uneven mobility, and asymmetrical power. We consider how such texts register these dynamics across postcolonial contexts. Readings across genres and media—including novels, graphic novels, life writing, film, poetry, and theory—deploy hospitality as a vital lens for understanding postcolonial subjectivity, relationality, and the ongoing legacies of colonial governance.

Call for Contributions

Hospitality occupies a central yet unstable position in postcolonial thought, naming both an ethical aspiration and a site of persistent contradiction. Structured by colonial histories of invasion, extraction, and displacement, hospitality in postcolonial contexts rarely appears as a simple gesture of welcome. Instead, it emerges as a relation marked by asymmetry, conditionality, and exposure. This panel takes hospitality as a critical lens for examining how postcolonial texts negotiate encounters between host and guest, citizen and migrant, human and nonhuman, presence and futurity.

The panel explores hospitality not as a benign ethical ideal but as a contested practice shaped by power, temporality, and uneven mobility. Rather than approaching hospitality as a moral ideal, the panel situates it within philosophical accounts that emphasize its inherent tension. Scholarly writings by Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, Mireille Rosello, and David Farrier, amongst others, have directly or indirectly engaged with notions of conditional hospitality and border regimes as well as postcolonial temporality and futurity.

The panel invites contributions that engage with hospitality across multiple genres and media, including novels, film, poetry, life writing, and theoretical texts, and analyze how postcolonial texts register the tensions between generosity and control, host and guest, and home and displacement. By bringing together theoretical reflection and textual analysis, the panel investigates hospitality as a framework and critical vocabulary for rethinking postcolonial relations in a world increasingly structured by borders, displacement, and uneven access to mobility.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief academic biography (50-100 words) along with full contact information. All materials should be compiled into a single Word document and submitted to the panel chair, Nitin Luthra, via Ballast using the Submit Abstract button on the top-right corner of this page. The submission deadline is September 1.