Abstract

This article focuses on Stephen Frears's 2003 Dirty Pretty Things. I argue that Frears's portrayal of the encounter between a Nigerian man and a Turkish woman in contemporary London invites us to re-conceptualize the relationship between the migrant and the host country. The film invites us to compare the circulation of migrants across a globalized transnational world to organs removed from one body and implanted into another. It questions our usual definitions of home and belonging, host and guest, health and the power to circulate. It both refers to the hospitality paradigm and radically rephrases it by making us consider the relationship between migrants and nations according to a different grid. It does not simply propose an alternative grand narrative but rewrites a familiar script without trying to erase it.