People Out of Place Then and Now

Catalog description

Encounters between hosts and strangers are at the core of some of our oldest surviving narratives through time. The actions and decisions taken over the threshold, whether in welcome or repulsion, serve to position society within a moral framework, and simultaneously re/define the framework itself. Asylum negotiations, by their nature, constitute the ‘host’ through pointing to the existence of bodies positioned external to it. Yet, the appeals for refuge also expose the ambiguity of who the host is. In this course we will seek to understand how value is drawn from persons, whose condition is reduced to being bodies out of place. That is whose physical position means removal from – a place of rights, protection and belonging – whether through expulsion or by being relegated to spaces of constrained mobility – asylum seekers, refugees, exiles, captives and those without effective citizenship. We will draw on ancient, on modern and on imaginary liminal settings to investigate the unique role of people in such states for articulating intra-community relations and the space between civil rights and human rights. Individuals and groups in such positions of liminality – whose state is considered one of exception and characterised by precarity, unsettledness and threat of violence have a significant role in articulating the parameters of the non-exceptional – the so called ‘norm’. Here the perplexities of sovereignty are revealed, not only for the host, but for those citizen-strangers, the stateless or people with non-effective citizenship, whose existence lies seemingly beyond the possibilities of sovereign action, and yet there is the power to invoke it.