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it is no longer a fixed one. Theoretically, the westerners enter Africa as guests but they stay in the country as host. The westerners are those who take over Africa and set law for the locals to obey. On the contrary, the Africans have to accept the condition passively.
By examining how hospitality exercises within the play, we are able to see the fragility of absoluteness of the host-guest relationship between the colonizers and the colonized.
When visiting North Africa, Isabelle shall be welcomed by the Africans who are the hosts of the country. However, Isabelle actually encounters two hosts in North Africa. One is the French government, and the other is the locals. Coming from the foreign country, the French government is supposed to be the guest of the Africans. Nevertheless, the French make themselves the hosts and welcome Isabelle instead. In the play, Isabelle rejects the French government’s courtesy, and accepts the reception of the locals. Isabelle is brave enough to take her stance though she is turned into an outcast as punishment for betraying and discarding her identity as a westerner/colonizer.
In the play, the oppressed Africans do not revolt against the intruders but they know well how to get along with the westerners so as to struggle for existence. The conflict between different characters exists in different layers and becomes intricate undercurrent within the play. Notwithstanding the confronting positions between the westerners and the Africans remain irreconcilable, I argue that the act of hospitality creates the
possibility for the colonized to have both resistance against and power over the colonizers by regaining control as the hosts.
1.3 Encountering the Otherness-foreignness
In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva probes into psychological conflicts one may have when encountering a foreigner. According to Kristeva, when facing the other, one
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may easily sense the differences and thereby experience inner struggle. Kristeva goes on to illustrate the thought with the use of Freud’s idea of uncanny strangeness, and states that strangeness actually lies within ourselves. It is by means of recognizing the stranger
“within ourselves” that “we are spared detesting him in himself” (1). Kristeva contends that a person’s reconciling process of his/her self “otherness-foreignness” enables him/her to cope with the otherness that disturbs him/her (182). In New Anatomies, both the
westerners and the Africans are plagued with their own inner conflicts when facing one another. By applying Kristeva’s theory to Wertenbaker’s New Anatomies, I aim to explore the psychological conflicts between the westerners and the Africans.
In the second part of my thesis, I will bring in Jacques Derrida’s theory on conditional hospitality and unconditional hospitality to see how the foreigners and the locals interact with each other on the basis of the inversed host-guest relationship. Derrida is concerned about the foreigner question, and probes into the question from the perspective of
hospitality. Regarding the concept of hospitality, Derrida traces the original meaning of the term from an etymological perspective, and points out that the word hospitality in reality possesses implicit meanings of both hospitality and hostility. Hospitality and hostility are the practices that are contradictory to but dependent on each other; the two terms also lead to the ethical question that deals with the relation between the host and the guest. To deal with the host-guest relationship, Derrida introduces two practices of hospitality, which are the conditional and unconditional one. According to Derrida, the unconditional hospitality is practiced without any presupposed conditions. On the
contrary, when one manages to practice the conditional hospitality, he/she sets conditions in the first place and carries out hospitality, which excludes any possible loss or threat.
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Judith Still discusses hospitality in terms of structure, and points out that hospitality “is a
structure that regulates relations between inside and outside, . . . between private and
public” (Still 11; emphasis in the original). Hospitality brings in the distinction between inside and outside. For Kristeva, such a distinction reminds a person of the presence of the other, and brings about detestation. Kristeva’s aim is to penetrate the cause and the effect of the psychological conflicts and to cope with them.The idea of hospitality is being raised in different scenes in New Anatomies. The inversed host-guest relationship within the colonist context, however, complicates the discussion on hospitality, and even questions its practicability in the social/political background. In some circumstances, characters intentionally misemploy the concept of hospitality.2 In other situations, characters are able to apply appropriately the idea of hospitality. I suggest that the plot arrangements highlight the central concern of the play:
hospitality is subject to variation within the colonist context so much so that different concepts of hospitality are rendered possible to juxtapose with or even challenge each other.
By approaching the play with the notion on traveling and its major theme of the encounter with the other, I seek to focus on the foreigner question that is based on the discussion of hospitality. According to Derrida, conditional hospitality and unconditional hospitality are two seemingly contradictory concepts, but are actually inseparable from each other; the two practices of hospitality are never posited in two opposite poles. Many critics already point out that New Anatomies presents the fluidity of gender and national boundaries. I contend that the play plays with the terms of hospitality to imply the fluidity
2 Further discussion can be found in Chapter Four.
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of hospitality as well.
My major concern is to discuss the interrelationship among different characters in the process of traveling; therefore, I intend to read New Anatomies as the genre of travel literature by means of examining its traveling features in advance. Since the encounter with the other is the most obvious feature in the play, it will be my central concern. Julia Kristeva’s notion of strangers to ourselves reveals psychological confrontation between the westerners and the colonized in New Anatomies while Derrida goes further to manifest ethical concern in the diverse condition of human interrelationship by showing that there shall be struggle between hostility and hospitality.