‘We welcome migrants and the tourists come’: postmodern hospitality in Palermo, Sicily

Abstract

AbstractIn Palermo, Sicily, actors use the metaphor of hospitality to profess cosmopolitan attitudes towards ‘migrants’. This raises a conceptual puzzle: hospitality and cosmopolitanism represent contradictory models of social ethics. But an ethnography of one social enterprise reveals that the hospitality in use is not traditional hospitality. Rather, employing what I call ‘postmodern hospitality’ shows a contemporary, reimagined form of hospitality that is compatible with the ‘Mediterranean cosmopolitanism’ invoked. Actors can thus declare sociopolitical aims of including ‘migrants’ while saving their ‘dying’ city. But this politics blurs with economic aims of attracting tourists. Following ‘postmodern hospitality’ shows how local actors use idealized images of Sicily to appeal to outsiders while attempting to subvert engrained ideas of Sicily as ‘backwards’. The risk is that they participate in the European spectacle of migration, and the commodification of notions of ‘Mediterraneanness’ and ‘Southernness’.