Law and the Stranger

Law and Politics Book Review
Vol. 21 No. 2 (February, 2011)
pp.50-54

Reviewed by Leila Kawar, Department of Politics, Bates College.

Law and the Stranger is the sixth entry in the Amherst series of publications in Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, all of which have been edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey. The essays contained in the book were originally prepared for and presented as a seminar series at Amherst College. In their introduction, “Negotiating (with) Strangers,” the editors present the collection as a meditation on “the ways in which law, and in particular liberal legal regimes, identifies and responds to strangers within and across their borders, both historically and in the present day” (p.1). The six essays that ensue address this theme, with varying degrees of directness, from perspectives that range from critically-oriented sociolegal analysis, to jurisprudence, to literary interpretation.

The editors’ introduction binds the volume together and it provides a rich review of scholarly work in the field of political theory, both classical and contemporary, as it relates to the volume’s broad theme. The avowed willingness of the editors to draw insights from both liberal and critical materialist frameworks is reflected in their choice to solicit contributions from scholars working in these divergent traditions. Adopting an approach drawn from the humanities, the chapters are grouped not according to theoretical affinity but rather as pairs within (somewhat ad hoc) subthemes. Nevertheless, this theoretical ecumenism provides the reader with a provocative challenge to follow the editors in thinking inductively and synthetically rather than being caught up on the points of irreconcilability among the theories invoked.

Among the contributions that problematize the constructed nature of the citizen/stranger division, two stand out. Pheng Cheah’s chapter “Necessary Strangers: Law’s Hospitality in the Age of Transnational Migrancy” draws on two cases of the legal incorporation/exclusion of migrants in East and Southeast Asia to take issue with Kant’s conceptualization of hospitality as the right not to be treated with hostility. Kant foresaw global commerce as leading to the state of “perpetual peace” in which sovereign restrictions on transnational right would diminish towards zero, allowing for a more open form of sociability such that foreigners’ rights would no longer be conditional and all rational beings would be fully included in moral calculations. Contemporary transnationalists have theorized globalization in much the same way, as a process eroding the distinction between citizen and alien. Yet Cheah shows that global circuits of migrant labor actually intensify the extent to which foreigners and other strangers are marked as separate from community. Global capitalism, far from bringing us closer to perpetual peace, instead produces permanent dislocation, so that subaltern workers are viewed as disposable by migrant-receiving states and remain “permanently in exile” even after returning to their “homelands.” Cheah emphasizes that migrant rights, even when framed as human rights, remain conditional because they are administered by the state. She finds Derrida’s conceptualization of pure hospitality (distinguished from the conditional hospitality of the law) to hold greater potential for inclusive justice, and nicely illustrates this form of unconditional hospitality by describing a cinematic rendering of the welcoming community generated informally among excluded and vulnerable migrant workers in Hong Kong and China, a form of solidarity that does not depend on law or state.

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