ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the mobilization of hospitality' in contemporary debates on immigration and asylum in Britain and as a way of imagining British national identity. Absolute hospitality requires the gift or generosity of the state even as the ethical notion of this welcome goes beyond the political and juridical confines of the state. In contrast to Britain's hospitableness and tolerance, some of those strangers who arrive on Britain's shores are constructed as being abusive'. In this discourse, Britain's compassion towards strangers is used in a narrative of injury. It is intolerance and hostility inhospitableness that paradoxically endorses Britain's narcissistic pride in its self-image. The remembering of these past moments of hospitableness alert people to the work such myths do in present debates on nationalism, immigration and asylum in Britain. This appeal to past moments of hospitableness legitimates the present's inhospitableness, while simultaneously maintaining the promise of a future hospitableness.
