ABSTRACT
This chapter will read Xenia (2014) by Panos H. Koutras as a self-conscious pastiche, a playful revisiting, of tropes that have been used in the recent past by ‘new queer films’, including those talking about migration. However, what is crucial in Xenia is that Koutras uses this well-mapped platform of new queer cinema poetics to make a strong political statement on two of the main framing narratives about migration in the West: the issue of hospitality and the debate on citizenship. In this film, whose title recalls the ancient Greek word for hospitality and whose crucial scenes take place in an abandoned ‘Xenia’ state hotel, hospitality is not there to be offered but becomes an expansive state of affairs – needed by everyone, and to be co-managed by everyone. Citizenship – in many ways the central question of this film about two Greek-Albanian boys searching for their father in order to claim their citizenship rights – takes a similar unexpected turn: it is not citizenship rights but the very idea of citizenship that becomes a quest(ion) ad-dressed to everyone. Xenia ends thus with a scene that can make us think of what Lauren Berlant has called ‘diva citizenship’: a genealogical provocation, a moment of emergence, in which ‘a person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege’. The chapter will reflect on the importance of this idea for a reappraisal of new queer film and what it has had to say about migration and citizenship in the last decades.
