The Method of Constructing Narratives: From Disenfranchised Subjects to Narrators

Zusammenfassung

In the previous chapter, I proposed a conceptualization of hospitality, not merely as the moral foundation for countries to grant protection to asylum seekers and refugees, but fundamentally as a normative political condition that enables migrants to produce discourse alongside the native members of the receiving society. In the second epigraph for this chapter, we can almost hear Arendt’s resounding tone as she defies meaning that was fixed before her and re-appropriates her singularity. In so doing, she proposes the alternative subjectivity - the ‘newcomer’ or ‘immigrant’ - of a new force into society to be reckoned with.

The data discussed in chapter III, IV, and V were generated in a field study conducted according to the research protocol IRB#16-540, approved by the Virginia Tech Institutional Review Board (IRB).