Demonstration against racism and exclusion, Amsterdam, 2011. Steppeland - Lutgarde De Brouwer/Demotix. All rights reserved.According to the philosopher Jacques Derrida, the relationship between hospitality and immigration should neither be a one-way street that imposes rules of assimilation and acculturation onto the Other, nor should it simply be the occupation of one's space by the Other. For Derrida, hospitality has to be negotiated at every instant, to be invented at every second with all the risks involved, and without pre-given rules.
But the act of welcoming the ‘stranger’ has always been intensely contested, and only deepened with accelerated forms of globalisation. The current practices of welcoming the 'stranger' in the Netherlands, for example, are steeped in traditions of imposing pre-given conditionalities that are never really negotiated but rather imposed, such as visas, integration exams, citizenship tests, 'Dutch' as the language of asylum, and so on.
Based on our interactions and negotiations as part of Stichting Gast, a local support organisation for 'undocumented migrants' based in the Netherlands border city of Nijmegen, we try to think through the notion of hospitality as an everyday practice of negotiation. Taking the critical question of "When two people who don't speak the same language meet, what should they do?" posed by Derrida as a starting point, we reflect on our experiences to rethink language, hospitality, and the borders of nation-states.
