Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (review)

Increasing attention has been paid in recent years to the role of immigration in French political and cultural life. The 2002 French presidential election and the disturbing success of the extreme right-wing anti-immigrant Front National highlighted to what degree questions of immigration and integration have taken center-stage in France. Typically, academic inquiries into the role of immigration and integration have focused either on the political and legal status of immigrants and the evolution of immigration policies, or on cultural inquiries into the effects of immigration on the identities of immigrants and their children. Mireille Rosello’s Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest takes altogether another [End Page 161] approach, exploring instead the cultural interpretations of immigration through the metaphor of the immigrant as guest.

Although Rosello’s exploration of immigration in contemporary France centers on the representation of immigration as an act of hospitality, her study does not ignore the role of politics. Rather, Rosello reads the political treatment of immigration through the guest/host metaphor. What is more, she analyzes the ways in which both the political and social reality have been affected by this metaphorical rendering of immigration as well as the way in which social and political reality have altered the metaphor itself.