Sociology and Criminology-Open Access
Open Access

Hospitality and Hostility: The Dilemmas of Intimate Life and Refugee Hosting

Alan Sinfield^{* *}Correspondence: Assistant Professor. Alan Sinfield, Department of Sociology, Central University, Accra, Ghana, Email:

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Introduction

Until recently, studies of hospitality are less prominent within the broader context of studies of worldwide nobilities. Yet, both are entangled. There are often no discussion of hospitality without recognition of the movement of subjects across borders, and a discussion of mobility without attention to practices of reception, hospitality and hostility cannot capture the socio-political impacts of human migration in host countries. At the top of 2014 and early 2015, record numbers of forcibly displaced people died as they attempted to cross the borders of Europe. These attempted crossings intensified the hostility of European border regimes, leading to further attempts to dam already illegalised migratory routes. The discursive construction of a ‘migrant crisis’ through which this event was politicised signified the extent of European unpreparedness to adequately answer the massive number of individuals who were seeking refuge within the imagined safety of Western Europe. The frequently repeated discourses of ‘migration crisis’ and ‘refugee crisis’ represented crises of border regimes and led to increased policing of already tightly securitised European borders. During this special section of the Journal of Sociology, we explore the consequences of narratives of ‘migration crisis’ or ‘refugee crisis’ in contemporary, intersected global and native politics and studies of hospitality. In doing so, contributors bring hospitality and mobility studies into closer dialogue by turning their attention to the dilemmas of intimate life and refugee hosting.

Hospitality, with reference to migration and exile, is attracting increasing attention in contemporary policy debates across a variety of social, cultural and scholarly fields, including anthropology, cultural studies, geography, history, philosophy and sociology. Emerging scholarship on mobility studies has included a sustainedspecialise in the political, philosophical and ethical aspects of hospitality which contributions to the present themed section clearly demonstrate. The meanings of hospitality are crucial in analyses of how immigration policies and discourses are framed by politicians in both the state and beyond. Drawing upon philosophical ideas, hospitality has been seen because the giving of your time and space to others. While highlighting cultural and non-secular particularity, historians have pointed to the shifting boundaries of the meaning and practices of hospitality over time. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologists and ethnologists have emphasised how hospitality is trapped in systems of exchange, on-going relationships of bonds and delicate trade-offs between hospitality and hostility that together secure social cohesion. In contrast, postcolonial scholars have examined hospitality within the context of colonial power relations and systemic hostility towards refugees and asylum seekers. Furthermore, scholars researching Islam phobia and hostility towards Muslim immigrants have demonstrated how perceptions of cultural and non-secular incompatibility can operate to prop up ideas about an exclusive sovereign Europe. A growing enthusiasm for the investigation of (in)hospitality and (un)conditionality within academic spheres reflects the influences of studies of diaspora and transnationalism, home, borders, securitisation, moral bonds and citizenship.

Within the particularities of up to date asylum in Europe, as Picozza clearly states: the prism of coloniality conveys an analytical sensibility capable of drawing connections between colonial history therefore the supposedly ‘post-colonial’ present, particularly concerning the racialised production, government and socialisation of refugees. In doing so, she continues: ‘refugees aren't the merchandise of crises external to Europe; they're a product of “Europe” itself – as botha project of worldwide domination and a fragmented geopolitical assemblage’. during this context, while the support and look after displaced people and grief for the suffering and death of unknown others offers a challenge to the xenophobia that underpins the present European border regime, a decolonising approach offers insight into how refugees’ (im)mobilities on the one hand, and therefore the hospitality practices of the hosts on the opposite, are intimately intertwined with genealogies of worldwide colonial relations.

A decolonising approach to relations between migrants and hosts also must concentrate to gendered relations of care. While hospitality to migrants and refugees plays a valuable role in contesting social exclusion, women have historically been seen as having a greater responsibility for hospitality. Moreover, the development of girls (and children) as more deserving refugees compared with men, who are imagined as ‘false refugees’ or ‘economic migrants’, tends to suggest the gendered characteristic of deservingness of displaced subjects. Thus, the social values attached to hospitality also are highly gendered– also as related to race, age and sophistication (as the contributors to the present section demonstrate). As such, feminists are cautious about approaching hospitality as theory, discourse and practice. Additionally to gender, the main target on translocationality has underlined inter-racial hierarchies among those that are identified as guests or hosts. Hospitality as a shifting set of spatial and temporal relationships further exposes on-going and simultaneous processes of inclusion and exclusion. In an era of increased transnational migration and postcolonial hospitality, welcoming someone into one’s home can establish instead of destabilise one’s privilege. In working to completely understand the privileges embodied in governmental (in) hospitable policies and personal hosting practices, we should always not only connect past and current histories but also work backwards then forwards.

Disregarding the colonial genealogy of migration and isolating connected histories has resulted in an ongoing loss of historical memory that ignores the causes of the forced displacement of individuals. It also overlooks the very fact that ‘Europe’s relatively high standard of living and social infrastructure haven't been established or maintained break away either the labour or wealth of others or the creation of misery elsewhere’. Further, Bhambraasserts that the concept of a ‘refugee crisis’ not only constitutes migration as a far off and external problem arriving in Europe from the surface , but also displaces the responsibility of the worldwide North as causing the contemporary situation of ‘crisis’. In locating current forced migration in continuing colonial genealogies, a decolonising approach challenges the wilful amnesia that blocks comprehensive understanding of the enduring, intersecting global dilemmas of inequalities and (im)mobilities. In migration studies, a decolonising approach has led to a questioning of the predominant understanding of worldwide migration as primarily a South–North phenomenon and a ‘problem to be solved’. From such perspectives, while the worldwide North has been assumed to be the foremost desirable destination for migrants and exiles, there has been a scarcity of critical investigation of the role of colonial histories in contemporary migration and displacement.

Responses to contemporary migration and displacement in Europe are shaped by publicly circulating images of displaced people making the difficult and dangerous trek across and thru Europe within the hope of finding shelter. Many individuals and organisations have offered a welcome to refugees, whom governmental policies portrayed as needy, unwanted and unwelcome. This tension between governmental border regimes and public solidarity illuminates not only the very interplay between governmental hostility and personal hospitality, but also the ‘hospitality’ that reflects the facility asymmetries between the host and therefore the guest. This power disparity has different and intersecting aspects. In coining the concept of ‘white hospitality’, Kelly argues that both governmental and personal hospitality are often overlaid by rhetoric of inclusion and generosity during a way that ‘effectively leads to the displacement of responsibility for the government’s hostility, or, more precisely, declares this hostility as responsible and necessary’. The articles during this special section interweave theory and inquiry to interact debates on the socially situated and politically motivated process of hosting with reference to immigration, sometimes paying specific attention to the intersections of race, gender and age. Key concerns of all the articles are both the operational and vernacular facets of hospitality and hostility.