Levan Book Chat—Natalie Lauren Belisle, Caribbean Inhospitality

March 24, 2025

A discussion of Natalie Lauren Belisle's new book, Caribbean Inhospitality: The Poetics of Strangers at Home (Rutgers University Press, 2025). The author will be joined in conversation by Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez (University of Texas) and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (University of Miami), moderated by Nayan Shah (USC). Organized in partnership with the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures.

About the Book: The Caribbean has a global reputation for extending unparalleled hospitality to foreign guests. Yet local citizens express feeling alienated from the Caribbean nations they call home. Here, Natalie Lauren Belisle probes the relationship between these incompatible narratives of Caribbean life. Departing from tourist-centered critiques of the Caribbean’s visitor economy, Belisle instead gives primacy to the political life of the Caribbean citizen-subject within a broader hospitality regime. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts that traverse the Spanish, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean, Belisle interprets citizens’ estrangement through misdirected political deliberation and demonstrates that inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the nation-state. Ultimately, Caribbean Inhospitality recasts the decay of nation/state sovereignty in the postcolonial Caribbean within the contours of neoliberalism, international relations, and cosmopolitanism.

About the Author: Natalie Lauren Belisle is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Her research is interested, broadly, in the centrality of the Caribbean to the formation and ordering of the modern world, post 1492, and the development and articulation of Western modernity and its attendant concepts.

Open to attendants outside of USC. An excerpt of the book will be made available to registered attendants. Registration before the event is required.

This event is part of the Levan Institute for the Humanities' “Book Chats” series, conversations about new books published by USC scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. To see more events in this series, including recordings of past events, visit https://dornsife.usc.edu/levan-instit....