Education continues to primarily focus on educator-directed traditional transactions of pre-determined knowledge and skills not necessarily equally accessible or transformational for all learners (Smith, 2018). In contrast, deeper learning required for transformation requires pedagogies that facilitate contextualised understandings of shared meanings. Optimal transformational learning requires thoughtful development of the self as an educator, deliberate planning of safe learning environments and pedagogical practice that enables critical thinking. A pedagogy of hospitality provides a relational and safe space, but also an intentionally welcoming and critical learning space that holistically nurtures learners. Pohl (1999) identifies that hospitality is not charity but shared humanity as pedagogy; hospitality is a form of justice that facilitates meaningful learning.

Five key outcomes of pedagogy as hospitality are discussed in this chapter: love; formation and transformation; intentional nurture; critical empowerment; and hope and justice.

This book on Berlin’s grand hotels is a cultural and business history of the fate of liberalism in Germany. Board members of the corporations that owned the grand hotels, as well as hotel managers and hotel experts, through their daily efforts to keep the industry afloat amid the vicissitudes of modern German history, ultimately abandoned liberalism and acquiesced to Nazi rule. Their correspondence among each other and with staff, the authorities, and the public, reveal how and why this multi-generational group of German businessmen, many of them involved in heavy industry and finance, too, embraced and then rejected liberal politics and culture in Germany. Weaknesses in the business model, present since the 1870s, had converged with a tendency toward anti-republicanism after the hyperinflation of 1923, resulting in the belief among most hoteliers that democracy was bad for business.

How do the virtues of toleration and hospitality manifest in early-modern drama? This chapter defines the virtues of toleration and hospitality through their intimate association with Ancient Persia, its rulers and foundational Zoroastrian ideology of promoting order and unity in diversity in the kingdom for communal harmony and felicity. Although an unexpected parallel, early modern writers call upon the locale of Persian as a concept with the capacity to inspire English monarchs to model themselves on paradigms of intercultural hospitality found in vignettes of Persia’s rulers, such as Cyrus and Artaxerxes, in Greek texts. These stories of cooperation between Persians and Greeks provide the context for Shakespeare’s enigmatic reference to Persian clothing in Act 3 when Edgar momentarily inhabits a Persian persona from Lear’s delusional perspective. Shakespeare’s use of ancient Persian virtues draws attention to the subtle forms of intercultural cooperation that hover in the background of his tragedy and radically contribute to a form of historical revisionism that privileges the forces of cooperation over conflict between oppositional groups such as Persian and Greeks of antiquity.

This chapter is basically a review of a collection of poems mirroring the Yoruba cultural ethos, drawn from Etches on Fresh Waters, Scoundrels of Deferral, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, and Counting the Tiger’s Teeth. Believing the core of a nation to be its people, the poetry collections seek to present a narration of the nation through poems about the cultural practices, values, and beliefs of the people. Clearly, the chapter depicts poetry as a creative mode of expression, performing a “dialectic function of narrating a group’s culture,” and as a means of “documenting” and “teaching” culture. The chapter launches into the cultural significance of poetry and how poetry reflects the past and present cultural realities of the Yoruba people especially. The cultural ethos include salutations to the revered, celebration of ethnic identity, sermons on moderation, unrestrained freedom, and hospitality, amongst others, while some were used to show women’s sociocultural position.

This chapter uproots the border from the perimeter of the country, from the traditional dyad in which it is embedded and releases it in the urban landscape. The premise is that just as the category of space has been mobilized in the work of geographers such as Doreen Massey, it is possible to transfer this process of destabilization to the concept of the border and the shifting categories of crossers and gatekeepers. Borders are always in the process of being reconfigured, always in the midst of being drawn but also blurred. Through a selection of works by Latinx and Asian American writers the chapter looks at borders not only in their “ordering” dimension but also as sites that allow for reordering strategies of self-definition. These writers occupy a border in process and write from within the border. As a result, the places of resettlement where ethnoracialized and subaltern subjects have been traditionally relocated become repossessed to constitute a privileged standpoint and a self-fashioning from within. This double perspective of urban borders allows both to acknowledge the productivity of boundaries as well as their violation and subversion.

Chapter 3 considers the representation of the food gift in Shakespeare’s Pericles and Timon of Athens, and Massinger’s The Unnatural Combat. It argues that attention to hunger enables recognition of the role played by use value in gift exchange and places this in the context of the declining significance of traditions of hospitality in the period. It considers the recurrence of figures such as the discharged soldier and suggests that the soldier’s hunger constitutes a key means by which contemporary texts commented on the policies of pacifism carried out by monarchs such as James I. It emphasises the nostalgic dimension to representations of hospitality, but argues that this nostalgia frequently marks the system itself as untenable. It demonstrates that these plays manifest anxiety not simply at the scarcity and want which was produced by the nascent capitalist mode of production, but also at the problems of plenty and excess.

Chapter 4 interprets funerals and second lines performed since Hurricane Katrina to articulate an ethics of mourning and hospitality. In the context of post-Katrina New Orleans, these second lines perform memorials for all those who died or were dispossessed during the storm and have been unable to return. They are simultaneously forms of mourning and protest, occupying public space in resistance to government policies of diaspora. Drawing on trauma theory, I argue that Katrina can only be understood from a morally and politically engaged position, and healing can only happen within this context. Furthermore, I build on Jacques Derrida’s work on hospitality to link mourning and repair in post-Katrina New Orleans, illuminating the ways the people of New Orleans articulated an ethics for climate disruption through solidarity and social care. I conclude with a reading of Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones, which depicts the empathy, care, and courage of an African American family in the bayou during the storm.

Against the common view that the creation of obligations through generosity in gift-giving and hospitality is a pervasive feature of the Homeric world and an antecedent of the classical and later culture of euergetism and benefactions, a survey of the epic evidence shows that this type of generosity is in effect confined to ‘international’ relations. Within Homeric communities, ‘gifts’ are almost always forms of payment for services rendered or tributes to those of higher status, and the flow of wealth is from the community to the elite more than vice-versa. The origins of public benefactions therefore do not lie in a culture of gift-giving but in an ideology of ‘public service’ owed by the elite to the community. In Homer, such service is ideally performed in war, counsel and the administration of justice, but as political and military changes reduced the scope for elite performance in these arenas while public spending needs increased during the archaic period, the community increasingly came to expect financial services instead from the elite.

Part I of this book focused on EU policy and explored the ways in which crisis politics intensify longer-standing practices of governing migration through which the deaths and vulnerabilities of people on the move are rendered regular and acceptable. Drawing attention to the various policy mechanisms as well as to dynamics of power and violence that constitute this process of normalising death and vulnerability, it situated contemporary practices of governing migration in the context of a modern European tradition of humanism that is embedded in colonial dynamics and that ultimately fails in its attempt to maintain the security of home. By showing how the so-called Mediterranean migration crisis of 2015–2016 was prompted by a series of border deaths in which biophysical violence and processes of ultra-precaritisation emerged in shocking terms, Part I highlighted the abandonment of people on the move to the environmental forces of the Mediterranean Sea and to situations of harm on arrival to the EU as casualties or survivors. Yet, while the ‘Mediterranean migration crisis’ opened opportunities for consideration of the ongoing colonial legacies and the human conceits embedded within a modern European tradition of humanism and manifest in EU practices of governing migration, the political response was at best limited. Showing how the situation provoked a further toleration of biophysical violence and ultra-precarity on the part of EU governing authorities, Part I argued that EU practices of governing migration rest on the engagement of a form of humanitarian government in which appeals to human dignity reflect longer-standing racialised hierarchies between worthy and unworthy lives. Nevertheless, it also hinted at the importance of moving beyond a critique of humanism, humanitarianism and human dignity, to explore how alternative responses to border deaths challenge a divisive politics grounded in concerns to secure home. Part II thus shifts attention from the mobilisation of dignity by governing authorities to its mobilisation by allies of people on the move, exploring how different pro-migration activist interventions have emerged in terms that produce solidarity and hope for those embroiled in a so-called crisis. Each chapter in Part II examines a specific intervention in its material and discursive dimensions and considers how – and to what extent – the intervention contests the policy mechanisms and dynamics of power and violence through which death and vulnerability are normalised. As such, Part II not only undertakes an analysis of three different interventions in their own right, but also considers their potential – as well as their limitations – in mobilising the concept of dignity towards the creation of alternative horizons of solidarity and hope.

In this chapter we turn to the question how letters were delivered to their destinations and beyond. We consider the difference between public and private letters and their bearers, and what impact this may have had on early Christian correspondences. Modes of transport and various possible itineraries affected the progress of the letter from the writing to the delivery stage, in all of this the bearer being of paramount importance, which requires us to investigate as far as possible the identity of the couriers, and how they were chosen. The important place occupied by the verbal report of the bearers is addressed, together with the considerable problems and hazards which they faced in their missions, some of which were occasioned by brigands, delay or haste. We consider the hospitality offered to these travellers and the friendship which either existed or could ensue between them and the recipients of letters. Finally, we look briefly at the circulation and forwarding of letters.

This chapter introduces the topic, theoretical approach, and sources used to write the present history of Jeddah. The local perception of Jeddah as ‘different’ in a Saudi Arabian context serves as the point of departure for this undertaking. Building on the local view of a city hospitable to Muslim pilgrims, a number of practices are discerned which allow the characterisation of Jeddah as a cosmopolitan city with a distinct set of convivial practices. These will be explored throughout the book using a broad range of Arabic, Ottoman, and foreign sources, produced both by governments and individuals. These also include travelogues and local histories as well as material dealing with local traditions.

The Odyssey is a tale of a hero of exceptional endurance and metis (cunning intelligence) who wins kleos (fame) by achieving a successful nostos (return home). The poem establishes the oikos (home) as a locus for heroic activity by portraying hospitality (xeneia) as sacred to Zeus and by investing all domestic guardians with ethical and intellectual superiority over the perpetrators of bia (brute force) who would destroy the hero’s house and family and bring anarchy on his kingdom.

Ritual and hospitality bind together the fiction of Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy. As their various protagonists struggle to find their way in landscapes no longer familiar, they turn to rituals, both established and newly concocted, as a way to navigate. Just as Hemingway’s heroes seek human connection as a way to heal their spiritual brokenness, so, too, do McCarthy’s protagonists, who turn to the rituals of hospitality. Their actions serve as affirmation that there is hope in spite of the evil prevalent in the world. In particular, the rituals of sacrifice and thanksgiving performed by women suggest God’s promise of the earth’s ultimate and mysterious goodness. These writers offer rich opportunities for comparison both in the college classroom and in critical conversation.

This chapter demonstrates how the idea of reciprocity: the idea of ‘what is owed in return’ permeated ordinary life. Wergeld was what a free man could honourably accept in return for an affront. Anglo-Saxon kings and their entourages were supported by a system of ‘uplifting’ resembling that of the Scottish clan chieftains, provided with food and drink and fodder collected from the farms of the districts they travelled through. The peasant families of the kingdom were expected to feed the king and his familia as if this remote group of high personages were literally their guests. It is suggested that the system may have originated in a period when the people of small regions were obliged to hand over produce to support a dominant figure with whom they felt a strong connection. The evidence suggests of later manorial custom suggests that hospitality continued to provide a language in which social relationships, even exploitative ones, might be expressed in a way which preserved people’s sense of worth.