Life in the UK Citizenship Test, inaugurated under the Labour Government in 2005. It argues that the test exemplifies the predicament of all attempts at cosmopolitan hospitality as unconditional welcoming, through a discussion of the relation between questioning and welcoming the stranger. Establishing the relationship between cosmopolitanism and hospitality as envisaged in Derrida's reading of Kant it asks what kind of cosmopolitan hospitality is either possible or desirable by exploring what Derrida calls the 'perversions' inherent in the structures of hospitality. It focuses on the concept of the 'trick questions' that the state asks the foreigner observed by Derrida in his reading of The Apology of Socrates; questions that seem to invite answers but foreclose the possibilities of a free response. The second text asks how this logic that Derrida identifies can be pushed or coaxed into new ways of addressing the perceived threats of 'unconditional' hospitality through a reading of 'unconditional hospitality' as queer in the work of Tove Jansson Eleanor Byrne, Manchester Metropolitan University Ellie Byrne is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Her research and teaching covers twentieth century British and Postcolonial literature and theory. She has written on Salman Rushdie, intersections between postmodernism and postcolonial theory and postcolonial archives. Recent publications include a monograph, Homi K. Bhabha, (Palgrave, 2009), 'Texting Obama' Comparative American Studies, vol.10, Double issue 2-3 (Co-Editor), 2012. She is currently researching a monograph on the representation of Hawaii in contemporary literature and culture. Trick questions: cosmopolitan hospitality (Eleanor Byrne, Manchester Metropolitan University)

This special issue offers a timely and current critical evaluation of the morbid symptoms and potential wounds of ‘Brexit Culture’ as its implications, causes and effects unravel in front of a global audience via multiple media in real time. Brexit cultures, for the purposes of our articles here, attends to the role of cultural production in forging political choices, and to the cultural dimensions of Brexit – as a response to living in times of crisis and uncertainty. Departing from solely political or economic evaluations of Brexit’s effects, contributions to the special issue explore how the humanities and social sciences, artists and writers engage with the challenges, threats and potential disasters of Brexit. This issue interrogates how multiple constituencies that make up the inhabitants of the UK deal with a climate of continued uncertainty about definitions and effects of Brexit as they unfold in everyday cultural practices and specific locations, and what kind of responses...

Homi K. Bhabha’s introduction to his collected essays, The Location of Culture, opens with an apprehension of the moment he is writing from as one marked by disorientation, with the ‘posts’ of postmodernism, postcolonialism and postfeminism on the one hand and the sense of restless movements, a moving back and forth, ‘here and there’, that has unhooked contemporary critical theory from fixed and primary organisational categories, and has produced constellations of ways of being that acknowledge “race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation”.1 The central proposition established in this opening is the argument that it is “theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, … to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural difference.

This paper explores a tension between the pleasures of gardening and the colonial legacy of botany as Jamaica Kincaid demonstrates it in My Garden (Book). It asks if reading Kincaid’s text in conjunction with ecocritical discourses emerging in the Caribbean and elsewhere might illuminate Kincaid’s own project as it relates to an ‘uncanny worlding’ that Kincaid performs in her plant writing. Through a discussion of the emerging field of tropical gothic and ecogothic this paper argues for an attention to the ways in which histories of violent contact, appropriation and resource extraction associated with plantation economies are gestured to in Kincaid’s writing with uncanny and gothic effects. The paper considers the ways in which both Kincaid’s garden in Vermont, and the Botanical Gardens in Antigua offer places for forms of ‘plant thinking’ that haunt the present and speak of wilfully forgotten violences and that demonstrate a common ground between vegetal, animal and human lives in...

This essay discusses the depiction of the post-Brexit British landscape in the first three novels in Ali Smith's seasonthemed State of the Nation quartet, Autumn (2016), Winter (2017) and Spring (2018). It engages with contemporary ecocritical and feminist conceptualisations of climate change, and debates about the relationship between ecological crisis and the current political landscape to consider the ways in which these subjects are embedded in Smith's trilogy named for the seasons. It reflects on the potential for the novel form to attempt to bear witness to the present political moment and argues that Smith's fragmented and polyvocal texts represent an ethical and politically engaged approach to the contemporary crisis, where the novel can seek to enable or rehearse dialogues between groups whose positions are entrenched and at an impasse. It discusses the ways in which the novels dramatise the necessary ways out of seemingly irreconcilable differences through a celebration of empathy, ecological awareness and hospitality.

Herein I argue that we can learn from literary texts, but not in the same manner by which we learn from philosophical texts. I consider whether literary texts are successful in imparting empirical knowledge, knowledge of what it is like to undergo particular experiences, knowledge of how to reconceptualize situations or knowledge of how to empathize; I conclude that literary texts teach us how we may reconceptualize situations and how to better empathize with others.
I begin by considering what we may learn from fictional philosophical thought experiments and reasons why these may succeed and fail to convince the reader, concluding that they successfully challenge intuitions but often fail to establish that the conclusions drawn hold true as generalizations. Next I compare philosophical thought experiments with literary texts, concluding that literary texts can act as thought experiments but, contrary to philosophical thought experiments, will often abstain from prescribing a particular conclusion to the reader. I evaluate New and Stolnitz’s arguments that we cannot learn from literary texts and conclude that they only succeed in establishing that literary texts cannot impart empirical knowledge. Finally I consider the extent to which Nussbaum is successful in arguing that experience of literary reading teaches us how to empathize and to be more compassionate.

The essay explores the ways in which Alzheimer's life-writing negotiates contemporary biomedical discourses on the brain, brain disease, and selfhood, tracing the ways in which emergent genetic and neuro-scientific knowledge is organized and related to the scripting of life narratives -specifically Charles Pierce's account of his family's history of Alzheimer's disease in his memoir, Hard to Forget. The discussion of this text is framed by an engagement with Nikolas Rose and Carl Novas's work on biological citizenship and biosociality as a productive context in which to consider how Pierce explores the relationships between genetic research and genealogy and between biomedical and biographical models of the subject.

This paper sets out to chart the twentieth century history of a single word 'care' and to make a case for the significance of this kind of linguistic enquiry to an engagement with contemporary disability culture and to Literary and Cultural Disability Studies as a field. As part of this investigation, I will

What I want to talk about today is the intersection of contemporary Alzheimer's culture (by which I mean the discourses, practices, representations and political rhetoric that constitute and flow from this disease model) and the economic and political doctrine and practices that characterise neoliberalism. I want to do so for two reasons, first in order to explore the ways in which this conjunction impacts upon notions of the family as the locus of care and second to make an argument about the distinctive contribution of literary culturespecifically the novel -to our understanding of this phenomena.