The Idea of Hospitality II: Fiction, Film, and Media in Our Time

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What does it mean to welcome strangers today? How does it feel to be the outsider or the exile? How should we imagine hospitality for the refugee, the business traveler, the homeless person, the guest worker, the asylum seeker, the tourist? As border controls tighten and questions of belonging become increasingly vexed, writers and artists are exploring the hardest questions about hospitality. This half of the course, offered as a 2 credit unit, will focus on treatments of hospitality in fiction, film, and other media in our own time, including Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Stephen Frear's film, Dirty Pretty Things.