Abstract
Derridean hospitality is seen to undergird ethical teacher–student interactions. However, hospitality is marked by three aporias that signal incommensurable and irreducible ways of being and responding that need to be held together in tension without eventual synthesis. Due to the sociopolitical materiality of race and the phenomenological difference that constitutes racialized bodies, educators of color in interaction with white students are called to live the aporetic tensions that characterize hospitality in distinctive ways that are not currently emphasized in the discourse on the educator’s responsibility as it is informed by an ethic of hospitality. The asymmetrical nature of hospitality is reconfigured through the terms of eros and hospitality’s link to education aimed at social justice is posited to be stronger than is currently suggested in the educational theory literature.
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Notes
Ruitenberg writes, “Hospitality in education is an ethic to be enacted by the “I” who finds themselves in the position of the educator” (2015, p. 60).
Ruitenberg acknowledges that there is no prescription for what hospitality looks like when the teacher is of an indigenous minority and the student is of a settler majority, but she also emphasizes that the indigenous minority teacher must maintain a reference “to the future (in the sense of avenir), to a future other who must be able to arrive” (2015, p. 135). While the argument I make in this paper does not go against the spirit of the above, I maintain that the discourse on hospitality has not gone far enough in conveying the full force or potential implications of the differential positioning of the minority educator in relation to the student who is part of the dominant/majority group. As such, the very understanding of what the ethic of hospitality may sanction, has taken on anemic undertones.
Proximity, for Levinas, indicates a non-spatial sense of “a nagging sense of concern or discomfort that comes to me unbidden; that ruptures or fissures the self-satisfaction of my daily existence and the stable meanings with which I navigate the world” (Sinha 2010, p. 462).
Aporia in its literal sense means, “absence of a path, a paralysis before roadblocks, the immobilization of thinking, the impossibility of advancing, [or] a barrier blocking the future” (Derrida 1986, p. 132). However, Derrida diverges from this literal meaning to foreground its “affirmative sense as that which ‘gives or promises the thinking of the path, provokes the thinking of the very possibility of what still remains unthinkable or unthought, indeed, impossible’” (Sinha 2010, p. 463, Jacques Derrida quoted).
A limit experience indicates, in Derrida’s words, “The impossibility of the possible, the possible of the impossible” (Derrida 2002, p. 387).
See Sinha (2013).
Here Ruitenberg explains that it is not that educators should not care how students respond to them and their efforts directed towards them, but rather that there needs to be a shift in emphasis from worrying about whether one has been a “good enough host” to “the obligations of the host to offer a space to the guest.” (Ruitenberg 2015, p. 33).
As Mills notes, historical materialism indicates that “our embodied experience is significantly shaped by the larger social body of the body politic” (Mills 2014, p. 25).
Ruitenberg has rightly criticized the reduction of acting hospitably with student centered ways of teaching. See Ruitenberg (2015, p. 91).
As an example of multicultural responsiveness that elides into reduction and reification, Alexander & Rhodes point to how queerness is often addressed in composition courses that strive to operate through the terms of multicultural engagement. Alexander and Rhodes show that oftentimes the very striving towards inclusivity, where “diverse identities and stories” (2014, p. 434) are given the space to emerge and be created, functions to fit queerness into a normalizing discourse, where “difference is contained in order to make it legible, identifiable and thus acceptable to a normative relationship” (2014, p. 431).
As explained by David Gillborn and Gloria Ladson-Billings, intersectionality refers to “how multiple dimensions of oppression (such as race, gender, class, sexuality, disability) work relationally, sometimes in unison, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in uncertain and unpredictable ways” [Gillborn and Ladson-Billings as cited in Gillborn (2012)].
For example, Ahmed notes that faculty of color may be boxed into the category of diversity expert.
Here it should be noted that it can be argued that eros both differs from and overlaps with certain characteristics emphasized in the ethic of care, which is associated with the terms of gender in its feminine configuration, and which is criticized by Ruitenberg. However, a full accounting of the differences and any possible overlap is not possible here. Instead, for the purposes of this paper, what I want to highlight is that an intersectional understanding of gender and race is one way to underpin the force of the distinction between eros and care ethics. The ethic of care foregrounds a feminine gendered association of receptivity to the other and engrossment, marked by motivational displacement towards the other (see Noddings 1984, p. 15–16). For educators of color, the racialized body may work in opposition to aspects attributed to the feminine gendered body, where the primacy of receptivity and engrossment in the other is interrupted by the sociopolitical, material debasement of the raced body; a debasement that may need to be addressed and prioritized over the engrossment and motivational displacement called upon by the ethic of care. As I explain in the body of the paper, eros, with its multivalent and ambiguous connotations of desire, more adequately comports with the experiences of educators of color in that it retains the space for the interplay of bodies as raced and gendered.
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Sinha, S. The Racialized Body of the Educator and the Ethic of Hospitality: The Potential for Social Justice Education Re-visited. Stud Philos Educ 37, 215–229 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-018-9606-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-018-9606-7