(In)Hospitable Encounters in Chicanx and Latinx Literature, Culture, and Thought

This volume addresses the notion of (in)hospitality in the culture, literature, and thought of Chicanx and Latinx in the United States. It underscores those ＂stranger others＂ against whom nativist fear and state violence are directed: undocumented migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Critical analyses focus on the topics of immigration and state violence, hospitality in written and visual narratives, and the role of hospitality in the translation of academic and literary works. All essays explore the conditional character of hospitality towards Chicanx and Latinx and its attending myths and discourses. Dwelling on the predicament that individuals and groups face as strangers, unwelcome guests, and unwilling hosts, the essays also explore the ways in which Chicanx and Latinx writers, artists, and filmmakers may or may not challenge the guest-host relationship. The ethical concern that runs through the volume considers material history and the institutional, disciplinary regulation of the uncertainty of hospitality acts as factors determining the narratives about foreign others.

Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger is Associate Professor at the Humanities Department of Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). Her most recent research focuses on the testimonial, documentary, and auto-ethnographic aspects of Chicanx and Latinx literature. She is the author of Battlegrounds and Crossroads: Social and Imaginary Space in Writings by Chicanas (2003). She is also the editor of Diaspora and Return in American Literature (Routledge, 2015) and of a special issue devoted to Rethinking Hospitality through the Culture, Literature, and Thought of Contemporary US Women of Color for Lectora: Revista de dones i textualitat (2023). She has published essays in journals such as Melus, Aztlán, Signs, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Journal of American Studies, and in edited volumes published by Routledge, Brill, and Palgrave Macmillan.

Pere Gifra-Adroher is Associate Professor of English at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain). His research focuses on nineteenth-century American literature, Anglophone travel writing on Spain, and cross-cultural relations between the Iberian Peninsula and the English-speaking world. He is the author of Between History and Romance: Travel Writing on Spain in the Early Nineteenth-Century United States (2000) and editor of a special issue on ＂American Travel Writing on Spain＂ for the Revista de Filología de la Universidad de La Laguna (2019). He has also co-edited, with Montserrat Cots and Glyn Hambrook, Interrogating Gazes: Comparative Critical Views on the Representation of Foreignness and Otherness (2013), and with Jacqueline Hurtley Hannah Lynch and Spain (2018).