Hospitality/Hostility in Colonial and Postcolonial Writing: The Guests and Hosts of O’Connor, Camus, Forster, and Rushdie

Abstract

Several canonical works of twentieth-century literature have dramatized the tension in the host/guest relationship and the question of duty in colonial and postcolonial settings: Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation” (1931) and Albert Camus’s “The Guest” (1958) explore these tensions and Ireland under British rule (for O’Connor), in Algeria under French rule (for Camus), while E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) provide two of most extensive and complex treatments of the relationship between hospitality and hostility in the context of the British Raj and its aftermath, and the later novel can be seen as existing in a relationship of both hospitality and hostility to the earlier one. Considering these four works together might help us, in the words of Alberto Fernández Carbajal, “to understand more fully how an ongoing negotiation of friendship against public enmity can find a discursive and ideological bridge between colonial and postcolonial writing (124). What the O’Connor and Camus stories share with the Forster and Rushdie novels is a powerful indictment of the ways in which traditional ideas of duty and responsibility for one’s fellows are disrupted by colonialism and its aftereffects.