As Jacques Derrida asks in Of Hospitality, “Must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of this term, in all its possible extensions, before being able… to welcome him into our country?” (15). Derrida’s question is rooted in the conception of the foreigner as the cultural, and important to this panel, the spatial other. Coming up on America’s 250th anniversary, this question is particularly fruitful when considering the environment of the United States; historically (i.e. Indigenous land theft and mistreatment, slavery, capitalist implementation) and contemporarily (i.e. ongoing anti-trans and queer legislation, police brutality, ICE raids, Asian hate, and the ongoing disappearance and murder of Indigenous women and two-spirits), the United States has produced spatial others within the same geographic area. Please send queries, suggestions, or abstracts of 250–500 words, along with A/V requirements, scheduling requests, and brief bios, to Joelle DuFault at dufaulj1@tcnj.edu and/or through the Ballast platform by 24 August 2026.

This panel invites examinations of American literary and cultural texts exploring inhospitality. Namely, how does the environment of a space—physical, liminal, narratological, marginal, etc.—promote and encourage inhospitality rather than hospitality.  Yet more importantly, how do authors or their characters challenge the inhospitality of their created or inspired surroundings—in rejection, transformation, hybridization, etc. of— and what effect does that have on our understanding of (in)hospitality?  And ultimately, what ripples are created when our cultural perspective is one of distance and intrusion rather than presence and welcome? 

Topics might include:

• Dystopian/Utopian environments

• Social Media/AI utilization

• Homo Sacer’s in fiction and nonfiction

• State-/Citizenshiplessness

• Environmental production of the foreigner/the other/the monster

• The creation and/or upkeep of inhospital spaces

• Hauntology/Myth work

• Ecological, Queer, and/or Postcolonial inhospitality