Hospitality/Hostility in Colonial and Postcolonial Writing: The Guests and Hosts of O'Connor, Camus, Forster, and Rushdie

Several canonical works of twentieth-century literature have dramatized the tension in the host/guest relationship and the question of duty in colonial and postcolonial settings: Frank O'Connor's "Guests of the Nation" (1931) and Albert Camus' "The Guest" (1958) explore these tensions in Ireland under British rule (O'Connor) and in Algeria under French rule (Camus), while E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924) and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) provide two of the most extensive and complex treatments of the relationship between hospitality and hostility in the context of the British Raj and its aftermath, with the later novel existing in a relationship of both hospitality and hostility to the earlier one. Considering these four works together might help us, in the words of Alberto Fernández Carbajal, "to understand more fully how an ongoing negotiation of friendship against public enmity can find a discursive and ideological bridge between colonial and postcolonial writing" (124). What the O'Connor and Camus stories share with the Forster and Rushdie novels is a powerful indictment of how traditional ideas of duty and responsibility for one's fellows are disrupted by colonialism and its aftereffects.