Conditional Kin: Derridean Hospitality and the Threshold of Belonging in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction

Publication Details

Publication Date

10/08/2026

Volume / Issue

Vol 1, Issue 3 (2026)

Article No.

052

Journal

British Journal of Contemporary Research

DOI

https://doi.org/10.67693/BJCR-QJWEL9YY

Received

30 Jul 2026

Views

24

Downloads

13

Abstract

This article draws on Jacques Derrida's notion of hospitality in order to rethink family home as a site where hospitality is never innocent, complete, or secure. Home is looked at as a threshold governed by an unstable relation between welcome and refusal, and Derrida, in his work Of Hospitality (2000), categorises hospitality based on two laws: the “unconditional Law of hospitality” and the “conditional laws of hospitality”. The two separate forms of hospitality, together with his account of ‘hostis’, a term that shares its root with both ‘host’ and ‘hostile’, Derrida gives an account of how hospitality is put into practice. The domestic household in this regard becomes a space where affection is often inseparable from judgement; at the same time, intimacy is always tainted with the power to exclude. This enables a diverse reading of the family home as a structure that is always shadowed by its possible revocation at any time. By examining the two short stories, “Unaccustomed Earth” and “Hell-Heaven”, from Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of short stories Unaccustomed Earth (2008), this article portrays family home as a site where hospitality is never innocent, never complete, and never secure. When read together, the two select short stories not only talk about estrangement or return but also stage hospitality as an aporia, a domestic promise whose possibility depends on the very limits that undo it, and in doing so, the article shifts the idea of homecoming away from recovery and loss towards sovereignty, legibility, and the fragile ethics of welcome.

License

This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License . Free to read, share, and adapt with attribution.