ABSTRACT
In his defense of what could arguably be considered the rst alien law of America-the Order of the Court of the Massachusetts colony passed in May 1637-John Winthrop writes vehemently of the duty to regulate and impose limitations on the hospitality offered to strangers in the New World. The Order of the Court had declared it illegal for any member of the Puritan community to entertain strangers for more than three weeks without the explicit consent of the magistrates. Winthrop felt the need to defend the legitimacy of such an order, which was criticized as representing the abandonment of the “laws of Christ” and of the biblical mandate to offer hospitality to all.1 Winthrop asserted the right of the body politic “to deny some men place etc. amongst us”: “if we be a corporation established by free consent, if the place of our habitation be our owne, then no man hath right to come unto us … without our consent” (2003, 145). Winthrop justies the limitation on the offer of hospitality as a guarantee against the dissolution of the Christian community, then threatened by the Antinomian Controversy. Winthrop’s words, however, betray the intrinsic tension between the ethical openness demanded by the biblical mandate to hospitality and the political closure that he felt the “common weale or body politic” (2003, 144) required. Later in his defense of the Order Winthrop struggles to justify that “a man that is a true Christian, may be denyed residence among us, in some cases, without rejecting Christ” (2003, 148). Winthrop’s words reveal the uneasy cohabitation between the mandate to welcome Christ and the occasional requirement to reject “a true Christian,” or between what
Derrida (2000b) would call the Law and the laws of hospitality. The Law of universal hospitality, emanating from the biblical injunction to cater to the needs of the stranger without further calculation as to the potential “ruine of ourselves,” uneasily cohabits and conicts with the laws of conditional, limited hospitality, designed to maintain the stable social order within the community. Under the laws of hospitality, the Law would itself be illegal, “outside the law, like a lawless law” (Derrida 2000b, 79). Whereas the Law of hospitality is premised on blurring the lines between self and Other, the laws serve to mark the limits of how the stranger can be received. Such unresolved conict, present in America from its colonial origins, permeates the contemporary encounter between the emplaced (national) self and displaced strangers, and has, if anything, become even more relevant in a globalized world of unfaltering migration and international mobility.
