How we deal with strangers is at once a question of profound ethical significance and of practical and political necessity. In the current revival of interest in the concept of hospitality, the reception of philosophical themes associated with Levinas, Derrida and others is increasingly taking place in a context of worldly demands arising out of new global mobilities and institutionalized practices aimed at controlling them. Much critical work, especially in the social sciences, assumes congruence between 'otherness' or 'estrangement' and the crossing of national borders and other concrete...