Language and (in)hospitality Te micropolitics of hosting and guesting Cécile B. Vigouroux Simon Fraser University Based on a long-term ethnography of Sub-Saharan African migrants in Cape Town, South Africa, this article examines how language as ideology and practice shapes the rules of guesting and hosting and helps (re)confg- ure the on-going positionalities of both the nation-state-defned-host and the foreigner-guest, making murky the distinction between the two. Te key notion of hospitality developed here is examined as practices rather than as identities. I argue that this theoretical shif makes it possible to unsettle the host and guest positions by not positing them a priori or conceptualiz- ing them as immutable. It likewise makes it possible to deconstruct the cate- gories imposed by the State and by which scholars and policy makers alike abide, such as the dichotomy between migrants and locals. At a broader level, the paper draws attention to the Occidentalism that has plagued acad- emia, particularly in the work done on migration. I show how the South African case challenges many scholarly assumptions on language and migration overwhelmingly based on the examination of South-to-North migrations, which do not adequately represent worldwide migrations. Keywords: migration, hospitality, language practices and ideologies, South Africa, Occidentalism 1. Introduction In this paper, I ofer an analysis of the ways contemporary South Africa produces “its own kind of strangers and produces them in its own inimitable way” (Bau- man, 1997:17). I particularly examine the priority given to language and its entanglement with race in how Black African migrants are Othered in South Africa. My discussion is framed around the “politics of hospitality” as performed in the feeting moments of daily encounters. I show how language as ideology and practice shapes the rules of guesting and hosting and helps (re)confgure the https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.00003.vig Language, Culture and Society 1:1 (2019), pp. 31–58. issn 2543-3164 | e‑issn 2543-3156 © John Benjamins Publishing Company