PJAS 18-3
Cristina Martín Hernández
Of Borders and Bridges: Re-Imagining Hospitable Encounters Through a Feminist Border Perspective in Julia Álvarez’s Afterlife
Polish Journal for American Studies, vol. 18 (2024), pp. 29-50.
Abstract: While hospitality constitutes a threshold similar to a geopolitical border, the negotiation that its participants partake in commonly results in the establishment of a new borderline. Therefore, in a world where borders and movement are constantly being patrolled and (trans)formed—thus generating power asymmetries and perpetuating systemic violence—hospitality needs to be read as a possibility for ethical encounters and empathetic proximity to the Other. Drawing from Derrida’s foundational theory of hospitality, border epistemology (Anzaldúa 1987; Brady 2000, 2002, 2022; Manzanas and Benito 2017) and feminist theories of subjectivity, mobility and hospitality (Braidotti 2011; Hamington 2010; Still 2010), this essay aims at exploring the migrant experience as expressed in Julia Álvarez’s novel Afterlife (2020) by analyzing the interplay of hospitable and hostile spaces, and the negotiation of hosts and guests’ subject positions. In so doing, this essay unfolds the instability of binominal relations within bordering and hospitality practices to ultimately disclose new forms of relationality and feminist social transgression.
Keywords: hospitality, borders, immigration, feminism, Julia Álvarez
DOI: 10.7311/PJAS.18/2024.03