IN LIEU OF HOSPITALITY: FINDING CHOROSITY IN THE BLUE NOTE

Agency and/or Creator

• Zoma G. Wallace, IDSVA

Bureau/Division/Agency

Library

Files

Document Type

Text

Broad Creation Date

2026

Language

English

Location

Portland

Abstract

This dissertation proposes a new, radical mode of being(-together), in excess of hospitality, which I have termed chorosity. It is often assumed that the language of ‘hospitality’ offers the promise of unconditional welcome to the outsider, inviting the foreigner-stranger into one’s home/land with benevolence. However, this connotation is tenuous at best, as the act of invitation and the regulatory nature of hospitality impose a hierarchical social order that thrives on debt, obligation, and law. As ‘Master of the House,’ the host has unquestioned jurisdiction over domestic space, requiring guests to submit to its rules and thus leaving the promise of unconditional welcome unfulfilled. By extending Jacques Derrida’s critique of the contradictions and vulnerabilities embedded in the word ‘hospitality,’ exemplified in today’s geopolitical hostilities (ie. racialized violence, punitive immigration policies, climate change denial, and active ethnic cleansing), this dissertation seeks alternative terminology, to be generated from a revolutionary, ethical reinterpretation of the blue note in its archaic connection to ‘chorosity.’ To that end, it uses a method of transhistorical readings of a constellation of events, artworks, artifacts, and etymological traces in which the blue note is treated as a foreign traveler, a dancer, an outsider, an outlaw, an artist, a chorus, and a butterfly, moving through an infinite interior – an internal field of possibility informed by ‘the outside’ – that cannot be accounted for by Western means of measure, calculation, or inscription. As such, the blue note in its resonance viii with chorosity remains unfettered, even when subjected to capture or enclosure; instead thriving in transgression and difference, while occupying the liminal space(s) of multiplicity, polyphony, and polysemy. Chorosity amplifies these collective qualities of the blue note, releasing what I refer to as “metamorphic force.” This transformative energy carries the potential to open a restorative dimension to the violence that plagues hospitality, by shifting human consciousness away from the impulse to meet difference with enmity and defence. Franz Fanon’s call for an "endeavor to create a new man” paired with Silvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis in the imagining and the initiation of a new type of human, is answered by the blue note’s potential to initiate a new humanity by modeling a new way of being-Human-together. By positioning the chorosity of the blue note as the resonant trace of a pre-Socratic consciousness, this dissertation announces the coming of a new human consciousness that is attuned to a radical, archaic mode of sacred communality.

Keywords: blue note, hospitality, indigenization, metamorphosis, chorus

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | Philosophy

Publisher

Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts

City

Portland ME

Recommended Citation

Wallace, Zoma G., "IN LIEU OF HOSPITALITY: FINDING CHOROSITY IN THE BLUE NOTE" (2026). Academic Research and Dissertations. 81.
https://digitalmaine.com/academic/81