It Feels Like Home: Hospitality in a Postcolonial Space

The idea of community makes me claustrophobic. When I think of community, like Derrida, I think of defence, of walls and of exclusion. I think of words like ‘un-Australian’ and phrases like “threat to the community.” I am sceptical about the usefulness of community as a model for ‘being-with-others’ because it seems to perpetuate rather than address the conditions from which its apparent necessity arises.

As part of the project of constructing an inside— a place of belonging and identity—community also involves the delineation of boundaries which mark it off from a space ‘outside.’ It creates ‘un-belonging’ in the same movement as it creates belonging; the entry of those who do not belong is inhibited in the name of the community identity. I am fascinated by the prospect that Derrida’s model of hospitality might offer a way out of community. This is far more than the simple substitution of one word or concept for another. The radical difference is that hospitality is founded on an ideal of welcoming the other, while community is founded on the other’s exclusion in the name of unity. This does not mean, as Derrida is fully aware, that hospitality is unproblematic and endlessly ‘good.’ But it does mean that there are possibilities in hospitality for ways of being-with-others which are inaccessible through community.

Thinking about community, I thought of Margaret Somerville’s Body/Landscape Journals, which I had encountered in the past and ‘remembered’ as being all ‘about’ communities. It is difficult to briefly describe Body/Landscape Journals, but perhaps it can be called a collection of stories about Somerville’s anxiously negotiated sense of belonging as a settler in an Australian postcolonial space. When I went back to Body/Landscape Journals, I was surprised to realise that it is not ‘about’ communities, in that community is almost never explicitly addressed. But it is consciously, critically, anxiously about being-with-others and about negotiating difference. In my remembering of the text I forgot, I suppose, that Somerville’s project was to negotiate difference rather than to solidify sameness as “community.”