Introducció: Unwelcome "Guests", Unwilling "Hosts": Rethinking Hospitality throught the Culture, Literature, and Thought of Contemporary US Women of Color

In their reconsiderations of hospitality through the thought and artistic practice of women of color, the contributions in this special issue rely heavily on historical memory, testimony, storytelling, affective politics, and decolonial phenomenology and epistemology. Given the mismatch between a humanistic, almost old-fashioned discourse of hospitality and the secular use of the word in the service business, the essays demonstrate a renewed interest in hospitality as a figuration of ethics and a critique of its practical and discursive contradictions: between a legally confirmed identity and the encounter with the unknown, between the unlimited responsibility toward a guest and gendered and racialized economic relations, between justice and fairness and essentialist views of the other (McNulty, 2007: viii).In their reconsiderations of hospitality through the thought and artistic practice of women of color, the contributions in this special issue rely heavily on historical memory, testimony, storytelling, affective politics, and decolonial phenomenology and epistemology. Given the mismatch between a humanistic, almost old-fashioned discourse of hospitality and the secular use of the word in the service business, the essays demonstrate a renewed interest in hospitality as a figuration of ethics and a critique of its practical and discursive contradictions: between a legally confirmed identity and the encounter with the unknown, between the unlimited responsibility toward a guest and gendered and racialized economic relations, between justice and fairness and essentialist views of the other (McNulty, 2007: viii)

So Close and Yet so Foreign: Trans-Border relations in Paul S. Flores’ Along the Border Lies (2001)

Partially based on autobiographical experience, Paul S. Flores’ Along the Border Lies looks at the northern and southern sides of the San Diego-Tijuana border region from a Chicano, postcolonial, postmodern perspective that considers class, status, and national origin as factors determining the way one relates to this place, the extent to which the border can be crossed in one direction or another, and the chances one has on the U.S and Mexican sides respectively. The discussion contextualizes Flores’ critique of trans-border socio-economic interactions in the region in the context of the 1990s anti-immigrant legislation in the United States, the militarization of the border, the freer circulation of goods across from the South, and the impact of the increase of drug consumption in the United States on both sides of the border. In Flores’ novel, the San Diego-Tijuana area is rendered as a war and illegal trade zone that has a psychological impact upon its inhabitants and determines the power imbalances between people of Mexican and Mexican American origin who interact across borders. Overall, Along the Border Lies offers a critique of the spaces Mexicans and Mexican Americans call home and of the values of the communities inhabiting them

Latinotopia-USA: International Perspectives on the Transforming USA in the 21st Century

From all indications, Latinotopia is about to become an increasingly domestic influence as well as an international or rather transnational phenomenon triggered by an ever-growing Latino and Spanish-speaking population worldwide. Nevertheless, domestic and global politics as well as a large section of the (inter)national and interdisciplinary research community still do not pay sufficient attention to these striking developments and transformations in this Third Millennium. This LISA e-journal number aims to contribute to closing this research gap from an international and interdisciplinary angle, bringing together a broad roster of interested critics and specialists from far corners of the globe who submitted innovative critical and interdisciplinary vistas on the burgeoning real and discursive landscape of “Latinotopia-USA”