{"id":14238,"date":"2019-03-22T11:42:07","date_gmt":"2019-03-22T10:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pocolit.uber.space\/?p=14238"},"modified":"2024-02-02T10:38:42","modified_gmt":"2024-02-02T09:38:42","slug":"gastfreundschaft-hospitality-by-priya-basil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/2019\/03\/22\/gastfreundschaft-hospitality-by-priya-basil\/","title":{"rendered":"Gastfreundschaft (Hospitality)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

At a reading of her latest book, Gastfreundschaft,<\/em> in Berlin in March 2019, Priya Basil related its conception story; her editor had asked her if she didn\u2019t want to write something about food and politics. Upon reflection, she found hospitality in its various permutations to be the connective tissue between the two, and that is the book she has written: a book about food, politics, and hospitality. In many ways a deeply personal book, Basil\u2019s account takes the form of a collection of vignettes, interwoven with stories of her own various experiences of eating, being hosted, and being a host. It tells of a childhood in Kenya, the daughter of Indian migrants, her family\u2019s move to Britain, and finally her choice to settle in Berlin. As such, her reflections span broad expanses of time and space to include the deliberate manipulation of famine by the British in India \u2013 a kind of murderous inhospitality \u2013 to her experiences of Langar, the meal offered after Sikh religious services to which everyone, in principle without exception, is invited, first as a child in Kenya, and later in a temple in Reinickendorf in Berlin, and also includes her thoughts on and impressions of the reception of migrants in Germany in 2015. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Philosophical\nreflections, for the most part inflected by Jacques Derrida\u2019s musings on the\nimpossible possibility of hospitality, are interlaced with these personal\nexperiences. She engages the power dynamics at play in hospitality, between\nhost and hosted, the ways in which these can and should be negotiated and\nrenegotiated, and how very fruitful it can be when they are. At the same time,\nshe speaks to the genealogical exchangeability of hospitality with hostility \u2013\nwhich, as she reveals, have the same Indo-European etymology. This she\ncrystallises through stories of her grandmother, who as a woman of her\ngeneration and cultural background did not always have much choice in the\nhospitality expected of her. It is a very honest book, in which Basil appears\nnot to shy from revealing also less flattering aspects of her own relationships\nto hospitality, and sometimes difficult family histories. Fans of her famous\ndebut novel, Ishq and Mushq<\/em>, will\nrecognise the story told there in most of its salient features as\nautobiographical, including Sarna\u2019s use of food and cooking to exert control\nand power in the face of feelings of powerlessness, accompanied by delicious\nand detailed descriptions of various meals. Like Ishq and Mushq<\/em>, it may leave you hungry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a relatively quick and easy read, published in Beatrice Fassbender\u2019s German translation first, with the English original only coming out later this year. Insel Verlag has published it as a beautiful little book that will fit in your coat pocket. Politically, one might have hoped for it to go a bit further in demanding something of its readers \u2013 particularly its privileged European readers \u2013 in the face of what might well be read as the multiple failures of hospitality we see across Europe today. But then some of Basil\u2019s ideas, such as that of a Europe-wide public holiday to foster a sense of a shared European identity, or a European citizenship lottery for people from less privileged countries, are appealing for thinking outside the box, and being concrete, productive suggestions to help manifest hospitality and make it more achievable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Berlin-based writer Priya Basil’s latest book is about the joys of eating and the politics of hospitality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":14203,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[103],"tags":[116,37,115,73,98,1421],"class_list":["post-14238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-food","tag-gastfreundschaft","tag-hospitality","tag-priya-basil","tag-review","tag-sachbuch-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14238"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16716,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14238\/revisions\/16716"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pocolit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}