Decolonizing "the Migrant Voice": A Dialogue With Hospitality

• In Event: Curricular Ecologies in Motion: Settler Colonialism, Relationality, and (Non)Belonging

Abstract

In dialogue with Derrida’s discussion of hospitality, this paper questions the grounds of the relationship that has figured ‘the migrant’ as a metonym for globalization’s dangers—an excess mobility that menaces the foundational sovereignty of nation-states. Using Sweden as a point of reference, the paper interrogates how the gesture of hospitality seeks to render arrival in calculable terms, establishing the beneficence of the host that leaves ‘the migrant’ perpetually at the threshold of (non)belonging. Efforts to include the migrant through curriculum and pedagogy seeking to integrate and include according to psychologized norms and values, and notions of experience and ‘voice’ risk naturalizing hospitality’s asymmetries and exclusions, while also impeding reflexivity toward the conditions upon which hospitality is tenuously granted.

Author

• Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison