The Hospitable US concludes a yearlong, faculty seminar on the topic of hemispheric rights, agency, and border epistemologies. Scholars from various fields and institutional affiliations, mostly from the Humanities and Social Sciences, will collectively reflect upon paradigms that ground notions of citizenship, nationhood, and gender, and bolster correlative dialogues on civil and human rights emanating from these epistemological coordinates. Our participants will share and discuss original research and advance a theoretically informed, common language on these matters. Presenters will read summaries of full essays and share versions of their work with participants. We acknowledge the generous support of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Office of Multicultural and International Affairs.

As a group of scholars involved in US-connected ethnic and area studies, we endeavor to bolster a new language on rights, agency, and identity amidst vast demographic and cultural transformation. The relationship between individuals and their political communities has turned ambiguous and perhaps untenable in our historical context. L. Basch, S. Benhabib, E. Balibar, A. Negri, and M. Hardt, among others, inform our exploration on the crisis of territoriality, and scholars such as B. Anderson, P.Virno, J. Nancy, I. Levinas, G. Agamben insinuate new models for articulating identity and community. A burgeoning field of scholarship brings these critical and theoretical approximations to bear in the Americas. This critical perspective challenges monocentric epistemologies concerning language, race, ethnicity, and national origin, in its various social and gendered modulations. In the early 2000s, a small group of scholars began exploring issues related to human rights in the United States as diverse social groups began reclaiming the full legacy and meaning of international human rights in their movements. The first national network on human rights in the US launched a 50 organizations conference at Howard University Law School in July 2002 and the American Civil Liberties Union held a major conference on the relationship between national and international legal human rights claims in October 2003. The Ford Foundation supported these efforts and spearheaded its own program with its pioneer volume, Close to Home. Case Studies of Human Rights Work in the United States. New scholarship is emerging linking the civil rights and the international human rights movements. Using the language of international human rights, Andersons' Eyes Off the Prize and Grady-Willis,' Challenging U.S. Apartheid, opened the extraordinary richness of the field by looking at race and self-determination struggles in the U.S. Other scholars are beginning to focus on migratory rights and the rights of belonging in the complex relationship of citizenship and exclusion (Gutiérrez, Santiago-Valles, Johnson, Kim, Wu, Rosaldo). We will take into account the transmutations of demography, cultural politics, and ethno-racial cartographies in the US, and the vast intimacy of this "host" political community. Participants should address one of three major conceptual themes: (1) the human right of membership; (2) migration and trans-border justice in the context of human rights in the US; and (3) the gender dimension, as diverse peoples claim what many view as their right to have rights. A reflective interest in human rights guides our group, as well as a philosophically inflected consideration of ethics. Seyla Benhabib's The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (2004) reminds us of Kant's Third Article of "Perpetual Peace" (1795), which establishes that "The law of world citizenship shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality" (in Benhabib, 26). "Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another" (in 27). In Of Hospitality, Derrida suggests that true hospitality requires "that we transgress all the laws (in the plural) of hospitality" and that establish a "categorical imperative of hospitality" (81) whereby limitations are abolished, even to the point of the host losing its authoritative sense of language, identity, and ownership over its territory. Profoundly influenced by Levinasian ethics, Derrida establishes individual and collective identity as anathema to hospitality and decrees the primacy of the other over the self. Various cultural critics and social scientists (Mignolo, Benhabib, et al) look at the right of membership, the right to move, the right to not be stateless (to a nationality) at the same time as they suggest that one is not confined to a fixed nationality, as principled human rights that are not necessarily attached to specific obligations. "Despite the cross border character of these rights, the Universal Declaration upholds the sovereignty of individual states" creating a series of internal contradictions that in practice debilitate the universal human rights of moving populations. The history of human rights in the United States complicates this scenario. Among others: the governmental claims of sovereignty to step back from universal human rights principles, the denial of human rights claims in American courts, the breach between social justice and self-determination claims, the 'politics of rights' itself induced by American exceptionalism, and the reluctance to incorporate in the human rights analysis the persistence of structural racism. Presenters and participants will address this subject matter in a multidisciplinary context, in which history, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, political science, and philosophy will help us frame a theoretical context in which to analyze concrete experiences.