Captivity and hospitality in the New Americas

This article discusses the languages of hospitality as influential in the construction of nationhood. Concepts such as ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ and ‘otherness’ have all contributed towards the understanding of America as a boundary-enforced country, outlining the mapping and bordering of empire expansion in the New World. The relationship of hospitality with nation building manufactures a sense of entitlement, community and national identity among its citizens. In this context, hospitality links home and comfort to the building of a nation and continent, yet also in a more ominous fashion, implies the demarcation of boundaries, the violent hostility of host and homelands and implied hostility directed towards external factors threatening the conceptual and geographical borders of home. This article examines nineteenth-century captivity narratives by Mary Jemison and Susannah Johnson to further understand the negotiating process of home and visitor relationships between the Anglo European settlers and the Amerindians.