This essay responds to contemporary political rhetoric proposed by J.D. Vance, who follows Richard Nixon in recasting universities as hostile institutions and intellectuals as enemies of democratic life in his keynote speech delivered before the audiences of the Second National Conservatism Conference in November 2021. Rather than defending higher education as an idealized or flawless system, the essay proposes a different ethical framework: hospitality understood as an institutional, epistemic, and civic practice. Drawing on philosophical traditions of hospitality and friendship—from Kant’s cosmopolitan right and Lévinas’s ethics of responsibility to Derrida’s reflections on conditional and unconditional welcome, as well as dialogical accounts of relational authority—the text reframes the university as a space of encounter rather than control. Situated within hemispheric and transoceanic American Studies, the essay emphasizes that American knowledge has never been self-contained, but has emerged through circulation, translation, and conflict across borders. Universities are approached as fragile architectures of exposure: institutions that do not manufacture consensus or loyalty, but sustain the conditions under which disagreement can occur without collapsing into enmity. Addressing debates over expertise, education, history, labor, environment, and digital knowledge, the text resists the conversion of critique into “siege rhetoric.” By proposing the figure of the professor as friend and the university as host, this essay invites readers to reconsider intellectual life as a shared undertaking grounded in responsibility, listening, and ethical risk. Hospitality, it argues, is not sentiment but discipline—and a necessary condition for democratic and transnational inquiry in the twenty-first century.

This introduction to the RIAS thematic issue argues that hospitality is, by its very nature, a utopian concept: an ideal recognized as both necessary and real, yet one that, in its fullest form, remains forever out of reach. Rather than treating this as a failure, the essay suggests that the irreducible tension between conditional and unconditional hospitality is precisely what sustains it as an ethical imperative. Drawing on a range of theoretical frameworks—from Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitanism and Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the Other, through Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle’s aporia of hospitality and ontology of risk, to Leszek Kołakowski’s dialectic of the regulative idea and Zygmunt Bauman’s diagnosis of mixophobia—it maps the diverse dimensions of hospitality. These frameworks—linguistic, narrative, carnal, and ecological—are further illuminated through brief readings of American literary texts by Henry Roth, Herman Melville, and W. H. Auden, alongside references to erasure poetry by M. NourbeSe Philip, Tracy K. Smith, and Layli Long Soldier. The essay ultimately argues that literature enacts hospitality rather than merely defining it, performing at the level of form what philosophy can only propose at the level of argument. The individual contributions gathered in the “Features” section of the issue extend this inquiry across a range of genres and traditions, including Latina fiction, dystopian speculative literature, war memoirs, the graphic novel, neo-gothic writing, and the African American sonnet tradition.

“No, this isn’t my house … I don’t belong. I don’t ever want to come from here.” With words of cold fury, Sandra Cisneros’s heroine Esperanza Cordero rejects the place in Chicago that her family has attempted to embrace as its new home. The embrace is prickly and problematic, as young Esperanza struggles to find an identity, to cope with sexual harassment, and to resist being defined by her parents’ crumbling, one-bedroom house on Mango Street. This essay seeks to understand the problems of community and its threatened loss as they are addressed by three essential works by three Latina American writers: Julia Alvarez, Quiara Alegrría Hudes, and Sandra Cisneros. It also references the groundbreaking sociological work of Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone, which examines in more general terms the loss of cohesion and trust in American society Turning to Alvarez’s novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, the essay pursues the problem of young women whose ethnicity becomes a focus of sexual curiosity and is overtly associated with a presumption of promiscuity. Alvarez’s novel is presented as an exemplar of a nostalgic text, wherein episodes are narrated in reverse chronological order, mimetically evoking a wistful desire to return to a lost heritage, now accessible only through the act of writing. In its treatment of Hudes’s play Water by the Spoonful, the essay observes the transvaluation of community that has taken place in the age of social media. The literal open doors of hospitable houses give way to internet chat rooms, in which contact takes place across thousands of miles, but at the palpable expense of true empathy and fellow feeling. In its discussion of Cisneros’s novel The House on Mango Street, this essay examines the phenomenon of the hospitable text: a work that an author creates with a conscious desire to create a congenial, comfortable space for the reader, even as the novel’s characters contend with their emotional homelessness in a new land—a condition that persists even when one has a literal roof over one’s head. The essay also observes how the isolation of a sexually tormented girl is made worse by unfamiliar, unwelcoming surroundings.

This paper examines Sabrina Vourvoulias’ Ink (2012), a Latinofuturist dystopian novel that explores the intersection of migration, race, and systemic oppression within a near-future authoritarian United States. Drawing on the long-standing tradition of migration as a central theme in speculative fiction, Ink presents a society where immigration control is enforced through a highly intrusive and dehumanizing system. In the novel, migrants are permanently marked with tattoos that signify their legal status, transforming them into visible “others” whose rights and freedoms are stripped away through a series of biopolitical measures. The narrative follows the experiences of individuals whose bodies become sites of control and exploitation, as the government uses the rhetoric of disease and public safety to justify the further marginalization and sterilization of non-white migrants. This study situates Ink within broader conversations about migration, xenophobia, and biopolitics in contemporary US society, highlighting how the novel critiques current immigration policies and the racialized processes of exclusion. The paper also explores how Vourvoulias uses speculative elements—such as the fictional tattooing process and the creation of spaces like the “Inkatorium”—to address the lived realities of Latinx migrants and their experiences of alienation. By combining elements of dystopian fiction with real-world political dynamics, Ink offers a powerful commentary on the fragility of belonging in a society marked by hostility toward immigrants. Ultimately, this paper argues that Ink serves as a crucial intervention into the speculative fiction genre, one that forces readers to confront the dystopian dimensions of Latinx migration in the US It challenges the boundaries between hospitality and hostility, offering a compelling vision of resistance and survival within an increasingly hostile, racialized system.

This paper discusses the memoir How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child (2017) by Sandra Uwiringiyimana, exploring it in the context of hospitality as both ethics per se and as an underlying principle of the human condition. Hospitality is considered what governs interactions between people and helps to understand how we approach our sense of identity and integrity when faced with the unfamiliar. Referring to the texts of Jacques Derrida (conditional and unconditional hospitality, the work of grief), the works of Paul Ricœur (linguistic and narrative hospitality), Richard Kearney, Melissa Fitzpatrick, and others, Uwiringiyimana’s memoir is discussed as a testimonial account and a narrative document of a member of an ethnic minority of the Banyamulenge from South Kivu, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As a girl, she becomes a stateless Internally Displaced Person who manages to migrate to the United States, where she is finally granted citizenship. Fraught with trauma and grief, but also hope and resilience, the memoir is shown to provide a unique space to record, evaluate, and foster acts of hospitality that undocumented refugees and migrants experience. In these reports, hospitality emerges as intricately intertwined with hostility; whether the one or the other will prevail is a matter determined anew in each confrontation between the self and the other. The implications of such a recognition of hospitality for both authors and readers of the memoir are also considered, alongside the memoir’s value as a genre of a distinct form and function.

On 24 November 2016, the Government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP) signed a historic Peace Agreement to put a definitive end to the internal armed conflict that had lasted more than half a century. As part of the Agreement, an Amnesty Law was adopted, and a definitive bilateral ceasefire and cessation of hostilities were ordered. Disarmament measures were implemented and transitional camps were created to facilitate ex-guerilla combatants’ transition to legal life. However, the successful reintegration of individuals during the DDR (disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration) process is significantly influenced not only by the material conditions and other practical circumstances they encounter upon their return, but also by how they are received within their socio-cultural context.

The aim of this paper is to examine how the graphic novel En el ombligo serves as a lens for the theme of hospitality in the context of the peace process between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP. Specifically, it presents the challenges and complexities of transitioning from guerrilla warfare to civilian life. This research seeks to shed light on the potential of graphic novels as a medium for grappling with complex socio-political issues and fostering processes of forgiveness and reconciliation, drawing on, among others, Derrida’s philosophy of hospitality and Deleuze’s philosophy of difference.

In What Moves the Dead, an American author, T. Kingfisher (a pen name of Ursula Vernon), reimagines Edgar Allan Poe’s well-known short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The novella introduces a parasitic fungus inhabiting a mountain lake that infects both animals and humans, transforming hosts into hostages, rendering the Usher manor, which stands near the infected tarn, a perilous space for its guests. This article explores the intricate dimensions of hospitality, ranging from the invitation and act of welcoming to the risks associated with overstaying one’s welcome. The concepts of “environment” and “host” are examined in their dual interpretations. “Environment” is understood both as the natural world and as the immediate surroundings of an individual. At the same time “host,” a gender-neutral alternative to “hostess,” is perceived as an individual who receives guests and as a reference to an organism on or within which a parasite resides. The brief overview of such concepts as ecoGothic, ecohorror, and ecophobia allows for the subsequent analysis to situate the examination of the host-guest relations in the ecological framework. The hospitality presented in the story mirrors human interaction with nature, illustrating that both hosts and guests may suffer dire consequences when hospitality is distorted. The article highlights the complexity of host-guest dynamics, emphasizing that the principles of hospitality are fluid and context-dependent, with potentially dangerous ramifications for both human and non-human beings.

This paper proposes the notion of “narrative hospitality” for interpreting a particular kind of discontinuous or fragmentary writing, and discusses this technique with reference to the work of contemporary American author Sigrid Nunez. Arguably, hospitality as a mode of storytelling and as a problem can be found throughout Nunez’s oeuvre. The paper opens with a section on the aesthetics of fragmentation, based on recent theoretical approaches by Vanessa Guignery, Wojciech Drąg, Meritt Moseley, and others. It then goes on to interpret Nunez’s prose as hospitable on the formal level and links her use of fragmentation with the theme of hospitality in “Chang,” “It Will Come Back to You” (2001), Sempre Susan (2011), and The Vulnerables (2023). Although there is nothing inherent in the fragmentary narrative that makes it egalitarian or democratic, it has been embraced as a transgressive form by feminists and queers, among others. Nunez’s use of this narrative technique is egalitarian in that it allows for the juxtaposition of various manifestations of in/hospitality. In fact, Nunez’s prose does the kind of work Lance Olsen described as “effacing, or at least deeply and richly complicating, the accepted difference between privileged and subordinate discourses” (Olsen, qtd. in Drąg, Collage 20). Nunez is particularly sensitive to the precarious position of animals, children, the elderly, the displaced, and all those who depend on the interest and hospitality of others, but her writing repeatedly shows that “guest” and “host” are positions rather than fixed identities. On the formal level, the theme of hospitality is underscored by the narrator’s openness to interrupting herself and being interrupted. In sum, Nunez’s technique of fragmentation lends itself to laying bare the contradictions associated with the practices of hospitality and their affective underpinnings.

According to Jacques Derrida, “unconditional hospitality” requires that you “give up the mastery of your space, your home, your nation” and “accept the risk of the other coming and destroying the place, initiating a revolution, stealing everything or killing everyone” (70–71). The concepts of unconditional hospitality and its inverse, conditional hospitality, apply not only to geopolitical analyses but also to literary studies. Genres and nations share several characteristics. Let us consider the sonnet. Its first “inhabitants” were White European men. The genre had well-established boundaries. Over time, however, non-white, non-male, and non-heteronormative poets have crossed the borders, demanding entry to the restricted space of the sonnet form, often called “prison” by literary scholars and poets. Like newcomers in a foreign land, these “alien” poets had long been denied their “citizenship” as sonneteers. The history of African American sonneteering perfectly illustrates this. To engage in dialogue with the genre’s tradition and to question the culturally oppressive mechanisms of canon formation, Black poets have forced their way into the sonnet. Whereas many have remained within the genre’s boundaries as “guests,” several other African American poets have sought to transform it through formal and thematic alterations. Rephrasing Derrida, one might say that Black poets have “initiated a rebellion” within the sonnet-prison, or sonnet-nation. The question is whether African Americans “destroyed” the sonnet and what has been “the hosts” response to that “intrusion.” In search of an answer, the article explores the host-guest tensions in the context of African American sonneteering, drawing upon Derrida’s theory of “unconditional hospitality.”

This article investigates the transformation of Amerindian narratives through the adaptation of the Ghost Dance episode in Dwight Jon Zimmerman’s Saga of the Sioux (2011), a derivative work based on Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). While Brown’s original is often commended for its emphasis on Indigenous perspectives and resistance, Zimmerman’s adaptation, intended for a younger audience, illustrates the consequences of narrative simplification, editorial framing, and ideological reframing. This study critically examines how themes of resistance, spirituality, and cultural identity embedded in the Ghost Dance are reinterpreted, diminished, or altered in the adaptation. Employing comparative textual analysis informed by postcolonial theory and narrative ethics, the research highlights how retellings of traumatic histories, especially by non-Indigenous authors, may simultaneously preserve and distort subaltern voices.

This article examines the redefinition of the concept of “progress” in US presidential political discourse during the Great Depression and the first New Deal (1929–1935). Applying methods from conceptual history (semantic and onomasiological) alongside an evolutionary history framework, we analyze the speeches of Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hoover articulated a classical liberal definition of progress centered on individual freedom, self-sufficiency, and formal equality of opportunity—a position that became disconnected from the structural realities of the crisis, thereby fracturing the existing political consensus. In contrast, Roosevelt constructed an alternative definition that assigned the state a central managerial role, emphasized collective welfare, and prioritized the “forgotten man.” However, both definitions preserved racial hierarchies, excluding African Americans from full discursive inclusion. The article argues that, while the concept of progress transformed in response to structural change and functioned as a contested tool of political legitimation, its apparent universality coexisted with—and did not dismantle—deeply embedded social inequalities.

“Young Goodman Brown” has been read, among others, as Hawthorne’s commentary on Puritan obsession with sin, as an exploration of the internal demons of the human psyche, or as an allegory of losing one’s faith. Moreover, since the story does not settle whether Brown is right about his neighbors’ hypocrisy, scholars tend to either argue in favor of the reality of Goodman Brown’s vision or see in it a dangerous illusion. In my paper, I look at Hawthorne’s short story through the prism of William James’s philosophy of pragmatism in general, and his “Varieties of Religious Experience” in particular, which allows me to understand better the narrator’s final comment about the impossibility to decide whether Brown’s vision was true or not. I treat here Hawthorne as a proto-pragmatist, who, describing Brown’s religious experience, is more interested in its outcomes for the protagonist’s life than its origin.

The Art of Power is an autobiographical account by Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve as Speaker of the US House of Representatives. The book traces her political trajectory from early campaign work to her tenure as Speaker, situating her legislative career within broader debates about leadership, governance, and gender in American politics. Pelosi reflects on her political philosophy, legislative experiences, and self-conception as a woman operating within a historically male-dominated institution, emphasizing how she understands her approach to power as distinct from that of many of her male colleagues. This review offers a critical assessment of the gender dynamics and partisan conflicts that shape the narrative, while also engaging with the book’s achievements and limitations. In particular, it examines patterns of selective self-representation, strategic framing of political conflict, and the relative absence of sustained self-critique. Despite its strongly performative and self-affirming tone, The Art of Power can be read as a valuable ethnographic document of political authority and feminist leadership within contemporary American legislative structures, offering insight into the exercise of power in an increasingly polarized democratic system.