英文摘要 |
This paper examines the problematic moments of hospitality extended to the alien, rethinking the paradoxes of transcultural hospitality in the initial encounter between the host/self and the visitor, a stranger, a foreigner. Hospitality is an act of sharing of space, time, food or other consumables and amenities. Seemingly a virtue, welcoming a stranger is nevertheless not without its economy of power. In fact, the idea of hospitality is founded on an altruistic concept wrought upon the economy of internal tension. Hospitality is conditioned by mastery; to permit entry to a stranger means that someone controls the conditions of hospitality by demanding the stranger to submit to the host's authority. Hence, hospitality makes claims of ownership. On the other hand, hospitality is evolved upon an existential question, as hospitality is rendered to the others, as Derrida suggests in Of Hospitality, before they are identified, even before they are posited as a subject (29). Drawing on Derrida's readings of hospitality, this paper specifically focuses on Brian Castro's two major novels, Birds of Passage (1983) and After China (1992). A Hong Kong born, Australian writer with a Chinese background, Castro unfolds in his works a transcultural space where hospitality is viewed as either an excess or lack-a process of continuous exchange and transactions between the giver and the receiver. |