Security, Hospitality, and Perversion in Muriel Spark’s Robinson

This chapter discusses Jacques Derrida's extensive writings on hospitality, including the concept of xenos, and the absolute right of the host to identify the stranger and as such, through this mandatory identification process, contain the threat that transnational subjects might pose. In For Today I Am a Boy, hospitality forms binary oppositions in gender and culture in a community, a family, and even within an individual identity, that of Peter Melville, the main character. This chapter includes works by Chinese authors who write about immigration, and who have experienced transition and transnationalism in their own personal biographies. This chapter focuses on successful bids for citizenship in Chinese contemporary fiction, where hospitality is explored as both an act of welcome and an act of hostility. The transnational Chinese fiction examined in this chapter brings to mind questions of conditionality associated with ownership, property, and culture that are inherent in the ethics of hospitality and influence the individual, society and community.