Language as hospitality

Dr Rachael Gilmour (Queen Mary, University of London)

There are plenty of ways to think about the ‘hostile environment’ as a regime of language: how English is deployed by the Home Office as a language of border security, or how refugees’ own language practices are used against them, most notoriously in the use of “forensic linguistics” in asylum adjudications. For all of us — activists, writers, literary scholars, anyone trying to work out ways to extend welcome to those undone by the hostile environment — this linguistic violence is the inescapable context to asking what a hospitable praxis in language might look like, as well as confirmation of why it so urgently matters. In this paper I’m going to consider this question in relation to two literary projects (at least one of which needs no introduction in this seminar series) which each have it at their heart in different ways. The first is the Refugee Tales project (2014-), offering an evolving vision and working-through of what it would mean to remake English as a language of welcome. The second is Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s recent poetry collection Writing the Camp (2021), where a “third language” that looks like English but draws its etymologies from Arabic, and which resembles nothing so much as the camp itself, is deployed to reflect on how hospitality is offered and withheld in language.

Rachael Gilmour is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Postcolonial Studies in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London. Her research mostly sits at the intersections of literature and language politics, in colonial and postcolonial contexts, from Grammars of Colonialism (2006) through to her most recent Bad English: Literature, Multilingualism, and the Politics of Language in Contemporary Britain (2020).

This seminar series is generously supported by research funding provided by The Leverhulme Trust.