Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [360-401).

This dissertation investigates five texts: Damon Galgut‟s The Imposter (2008), Anne Landsman‟s The Devil’s Chimney (1998), Eben Venter‟s My Beautiful Death (1998) and Trencherman (2008) and Zoë Wicomb‟s David’s Story (2000). In addition to being written in the post-apartheid era, these five texts are all set wholly or partially in the Karoo, a semi-desert landscape unique to South Africa. The Karoo is, however, more than just a common setting onto which their individual stories have been transposed. It is part of the literary imagination of each text. Within these texts are a number of fluid interactions between the consciousnesses and the landscapes they portray. Of course, to attempt to examine these interactions as occurring purely between landscape and consciousness would be foolhardy. As such, this project investigates these links by comparing the texts under investigation to the historical literary form of the plaasroman and by scrutinising them through the theoretical concept of hospitality, as outlined by Jacques Derrida. According to J.M. Coetzee term „plaasroman‟ refers to the type of early twentiethcentury Afrikaans novel which “concerned itself almost exclusively with the farm and platteland (rural society) and with the Afrikaner‟s painful transition from farmer to townsman” (1988: 63). This project investigates all five texts in relation to a number of the concerns common to the plaasroman, including the idea of the farm as a patriarchal idyll, its valorisation of near-mythical ancestral values and the pushing of black labour to the peripheries of narrative consciousness. These concerns, along with the fact that the plaasroman marks out the farm as a fenced off area surrounded by threatening forces, means that it is an ideal form to include in an investigation involving hospitality Derrida outlines hospitality, at its most basic level as “the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else‟s territory” (Derrida 2007: 246). This relationship, however, goes further than a simple binary. Both host and guest give and receive hospitality. From Derrida‟s meditations on the subject come two forms of hospitality: Conditional and unconditional. The primary distinction between these two kinds of hospitality is a distinction “between a form of subjectivity constituted through a hostile process of inclusion and exclusion and one that comes into being in the self‟s pre-reflective and traumatic exposure, without inhibition, to otherness” (Marais 2009: 275). Unconditional hospitality is the latter and morally preferable. In linking the two concepts, this dissertation illustrates the degrees to which each text, through subverting, or conforming to the conventions of the plaasroman, achieves instances of unconditional hospitality. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2011.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2003. / Advisor: David L. Clark. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 323-342). Also available via World Wide Web.

In my dissertation, I argue that both white and black authors of the late-1850s and early-1860s used scenes of race-centered hospitality in their narratives to combat the pervasive stereotypes of black inferiority that flourished under the influence of chattel slavery. The wide-spread scenes of hospitality in antebellum literature—including shared meals, entertaining overnight guests, and business meetings in personal homes—are too inextricably bound to contemporary discussions of blackness and whiteness to be ignored. In arguing for the humanizing effects of playing host or guest as a black person, my project joins the work of literary scholars from William L. Andrews to Keith Michael Green who argue for broader and more complex approaches to writers’ strategies for recognizing the full personhood of African Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. In the last fifteen to twenty years, hospitality theory has reshaped social science research, particularly around issues of race, immigration, and citizenship. In literary studies, scholars are only now beginning to mine the ways that theorists from diverse backgrounds—including continental philosophers such as Derrida and Levinas, womanist philosopher and theologian N. Lynne Westerfield, and post-colonial writers and scholars such as Tahar Ben Jelloun—can expand the reading of nineteenth century literature by examining the discourse and practice of hospitality. When host and guest meet at the threshold they must acknowledge the full personhood of the other; the relationship of hospitality is dependent on beginning in a state of equilibrium grounded in mutual respect. In this project I argue that because of the acknowledgement of mutual humanness required in acts of hospitality, hospitality functions as a humanizing narrative across the spectrum of antebellum black experience: slave and free, male and female, uneducated and highly educated. In chapter one, “Unmasking Southern Hospitality: Discursive Passing in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred,” I examine Stowe’s use of a black fugitive slave host who behaves like a southern gentleman to undermine the ethos of southern honor culture and to disrupt the ideology that supports chattel slavery. In chapter two, “Transformative Hospitality and Interracial Education in Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends,” I examine how the race-centered scenes of hospitality in Frank J. Webb’s 1857 novel The Garies and Their Friends creates educational opportunities where northern racist ideology can be uncovered and rejected by white men and women living close to, but still outside, the free black community of Philadelphia. In the final chapter, “Slavery’s Subversion of Hospitality in Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” I examine how Linda Brent’s engagement in acts of hospitality (both as guest and host) bring to light the warping influence of chattel slavery on hospitality in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In conclusion, my project reframes the practices of antebellum hospitality as yet another form of nonviolent everyday resistance to racist ideology rampant in both the North and the South. This project furthers the ways that American literature scholars understand active resistance to racial oppression in the nineteenth century, putting hospitality on an equal footing with other subversive practices, such as learning to read or racial passing.

This thesis examines the representation of home and hospitality in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret, and Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative. It attempts to trace the un-homeliness of the central characters and to account for their feelings of discomfort. As such, it argues that the home is incapable of being inviolable because the invasion of the public is always a possibility. The implication is that master narratives such as race, history and politics are always entering the space one constructs as private. That said, this study also argues that the home and those things with which it is most closely associated, such as belonging, comfort and safety, may actually hide a form of violence. By this I mean that in the desire for homeliness, one may exclude others from one’s home. Consequently, this argument draws on Jacques Derrida’s writings on the aporia of conditional and unconditional hospitality to investigate what ethical possibilities might, somewhat unexpectedly, be created by the un-homely home. The study is therefore an exploration of the potentials that inhere in a certain kind of un-homeliness, the most important of which is the chance to respond ethically to the alterity of the other. In sum, there is a necessity to extend hospitality beyond condition and beyond limit, and this ethical imperative is at odds with the desire for comfort and safety. The way in which post-transitional novels explore these issues of hospitality and home is the primary focus of this study.