Producing (In)hospitality: A Post-Brexit perspective

Abstract

This paper is based on the premise that hospitality “does not just take place in space, but rather produces certain spaces as more or less welcoming, more or less hospitable” (Lynch et al. 25). In other words, hospitality’s spatial dimension, which has been amply analysed in travel and tourism-related scholarship, is intertwined with a social one (Lashley et al.): hospitality determines who and on what basis merits welcome into a given space. In this paper, this generative aspect of hospitality is explored in the context of Brexit, which I read as an institutionalised framework for dictating and policing attitudes towards non-British others, and thus reframing the notion of hospitality at multiple levels. To understand this major socio-political shift in cultural terms, I tune in to the voices of those European authors who have been made to reconsider their place in the UK as a result of Brexit: UK-based migrant authors of Polish origin, Agnieszka Dale and A.M. Bakalar. Focusing on the writers’ reactions to Brexit, both narrative and non-fiction, I explore the notion of hospitality from their perspective as well-integrated citizens whose status as “white others” has been brought to the fore by the advent of Brexit, in an attempt to determine not just the impact that the rupture with Europe has exerted on their sense of belonging to Britain, but also its consequences for their private and professional lives. In more general terms, I wish to reflect on how the socio-political and cultural change in British-European relations, which Brexit has sanctioned, has been impacting European migrants’ perceptions of British hospitality and, more importantly, interpersonal relations in social spaces of the UK.