Welcoming the foreigner: Notes on the possibility of multispecies hospitality
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What do the welcome and the refusal mean when the one who arrives is not human? By examining the moral attitude created through the acceptance of European racing pigeons in Pakistan and the capture of Pakistani “spy pigeons” at the India-Pakistan border, this article unknots multiple meanings of arrival and explores how shared values of hospitality and hostility emerge and interplay when a more-than-human Other arrives in a foreign land as an invited guest or an uninvited intruder. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's (2000) construction of hostpitality and Punjabi Sufi poet-philosopher Waris Shah's discussion of badal (reciprocity), this article contends that in South Asia, reciprocal exchanges produce and sustain cooperative, competitive, or antagonistic bonds and propound an analytical avenue to critically rethink deconstruction of the home as a sovereign space.
Key Questions
What does it mean to open the door for a more-than-human Other?
How are these animal Others welcomed and accommodated as intimate foreigners or shunned as potential threats that may induce serious panic in the host?
And in what ways does the deconstruction of the house as a sovereign space render it a site of hospitality for the newcomer?
Inspirational Texts
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Derrida, Jacques. 2009. The Beast and the Sovereign. Edited by Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington. Vol. 1. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Inspirational Quotes:
“Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male or female.”