Welcoming the enemy within?: hospitality, autoimmunity and the blood feud in Ismail Kadare’s Broken April

ABSTRACT The protagonist of Kadare’s novel Broken April, set in the North Albanian Plateau, is required to kill his brother’s murderer according to the rules of the Kanun, a customary code of law according to which blood must be avenged, sometimes leading to generations of vendetta. In this context, the paper discusses the themes of hospitality and the blood feud in the novel, both of which play an important role in the Kanun, from the perspective of Derrida’s concepts of unconditional hospitality and autoimmunity.