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Hotels, refuge, and the rise of carceral hospitality

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Abstract

Geographical work on hotels has foregrounded their role as spaces of commercial hospitality, leisure, and increasingly as sites of emergency accommodation for a range of displaced groups. Developing such work, this paper critically examines the central role of hotels in accommodating and containing asylum seekers and refugees. By considering the use of hotels in the UK and Australia, we argue that the hotel is a durable and vitally important site of bordering, one that manifests many of the tensions and contradictions of state responses to asylum seekers and refugees. Far from being a marginal or temporary space, we centre the hotel as a critical site for the reproduction and maintenance of contemporary bordering. In doing so, the paper advances understanding of the hotel as a specific type of social, political and cultural space, associated with three dynamics that we explore in turn: forms of flexibility and emergency response, patterns of hospitality, and the violent displacements of the hotel as a site detached from ‘everyday life’. In surveying these understandings of the hotel, we argue that the cultural and political significance of the hotel as a site for understanding contemporary bordering emerges from its unique position at the confluence of the carceral and the hospitable. The paper thus proposes a concept of carceral hospitality , to designate the fraught positioning of the hotel between carceral conditions of institutional detention and spectacle, and the hospitable expectations more readily associated with sites of leisure, escapism and relaxation. It is this positioning that has allowed hotels in the UK and Australia to act as lightning rods for critical discussion and public concern over state responsibilities, welfare entitlements, and the narrowing scope of refugee protection.

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This article critically explores the complex politics of reworking colonial imaginaries in post-colonial tourist enclaves. It examines the persistence of colonial spaces and representations in the tourist industry along with the reproduction of boundaries that sustain distinctions between people. Based on research in Mauritius, this article identifies the distinctive characteristics of generic tropical, luxury hotel resorts and the specific strategies used to distinguish them as they compete to attract tourists. Through an investigation of a luxury hotel in Mauritius, designed to evoke the theme of the colonial sugar plantation, it is suggested here that these strategies rework and reproduce colonial representations in the present day.
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While serving as Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada between 2008 and 2013, Jason Kenney likened the detention facilities used to house an increasing number of asylum seekers and non-status migrants to hotels. And yet, when addressing the responsibilities of citizenship, he repeatedly argued that "Canada is not a hotel." However contradictory, Kenney's references to hotels and, implicitly, to the comforts and privileges they represent, draw on the idea of Canadian hospitality: the suggestion is that we detain asylum seekers in hotels or hotel-like conditions because we are an hospitable people but that our reputation for hospitality leaves us vulnerable to migrants who construe themselves as hotel guests with privileges rather than citizens with responsibilities. Paying particular attention to recent legislative reforms that will almost certainly result in the incarceration of more asylum seekers, this article asks how Canadian hospitality is defined and practiced today. More generally, it uses discourse analysis to explore the tension between the Canadian ideal of hospitality and the realities of an expanding immigration detention system.