Thesis Abstract

Sovereign Hospitalities: liberal democracy’s economies of violence toward its “others”

Abstract
In and through debates around Indigenous land rights, immigration structures and refugee detention, this thesis attempts to unravel the racialised relationship between ‘sovereignty’ and ‘hospitality’ under Australian liberal democratic governments. I bring together two usually distinct methodologies, Whiteness theory and Derridean deconstruction, in order to critically challenge normative liberalism. Normative liberal theory designates hospitality as obedient to sovereignty both at the level of the body-politic as well as in the expression of the sovereign subject as ‘host’. Consequently, I argue that the positions available within this theory do not adequately account for the ambiguity of the interrelationship between the two by reducing hospitality to dominant liberal discourses, which, in turn, serves to politically support and privilege a particular form of ‘white’ sovereignty. Thus, shifting away from Agamben’s work on the ‘sovereign exception’ and ‘bare life’ (which I refer to later in the thesis), I utilise Derrida’s deconstruction to re-orient hospitality and sovereignty away from this normative liberal logic in an attempt to promote an alternative ‘ethical’ cultural politics.