Terms of Hospitality: Postcolonial Studies in the Asylum Age (monograph)

The main aim of this project is to examine the future shape of postcolonial literary studies in relation to the concerns of displacement and asylum in the globalized world. There is currently no other monograph which deals with this emerging field in Anglophone postcolonial writing.
My principle research question is: can postcolonial literary studies engage with the concerns and strategies of contemporary inter-disciplinary discourses on asylum and immigration? I intend to address this in a book-length study of the points of convergence between postcolonial studies and refugee studies. Refugee studies is conceived of here as including the sociology of asylum, but also incorporating debates in ethical philosophy regarding the definition of hospitality; political philosophy and questions of cosmopolitanism and citizenship; legal philosophy and biopolitics; and ethnographic narratives of displacement.
In the modern 'asylum age', the reassertion of national sovereignty as a response to increased people movement, and the subsequent retraction and redefinition of the right to asylum, indicate that neo-colonial forces are shaping the provision of hospitality and refuge. Globalized economic flows have in many ways superseded physical borders, and the refugee is a spectre of the concomitant loss of sovereignty. In other words, the refugee signifies both the limits of the nation and the exercise of sovereign power at that limit. I therefore intend to examine various discourses in which the refugee is reproduced as a deterritorialized border.
The book will be organised into four chapters which investigate the strategies that enforce this state of affairs. I will begin by examining the place of the refugee in postcolonial Europe; the first chapter will focus on efforts to define the refugee, and subsequent implications for an ethics of welcoming, by examining the conditionality of hospitality and the fragmentation of labels that describe displacement. Subsequent chapters will examine in turn a series of factors which impinge upon the subjectivity of the refugee. The second chapter will look at the representation of the refugee as voiceless by those who claim to speak for refugees, in relation to the need to narrate or perform a refugee identity. The third chapter follows Giorgio Agamben's theorization of the concentration camp in order to read 'the camp' as a motif of (racial) exclusion in the work of Caryl Phillips. The final chapter will examine how both hospitality and displacement are conditioned by gender.
This book will engage with a diverse range of forms and contexts of displacement; not just the status of the asylum seeker in postcolonial Europe, but also other contexts of displacement, such as 'the camp' or detention centre in postcolonial Australia and Palestine, narratives of the 'Lost Boys' of Sudan, and irregular or economic migration in post-apartheid South Africa and the contemporary USA.
Postcolonial studies is by necessity an expanding and adaptable field, responsive to the emergence of new grounds of oppression, and much of the most incisive theory on hospitality and the refugee (e.g. Jacques Derrida; Zygmunt Bauman; Seyla Benhabib) is coming from outside the usual postcolonial-literary channels. I intend therefore to examine how productive intersections with other discourses of displacement can point the way forward for postcolonial studies to engage with the concerns of the asylum age.