Bhanu Kapil

Bhanu Kapil Rider

A fragmented notebook investigates mental illness and trauma in the South Asian diaspora

Schizophrene

Poetry. Asian American Studies. THE VERTICAL INTERROGATION OF STRANGERS blends the narratives of the travelog and the coming of age novel. It is written by a young Indian woman whose travels take her between homes in two countries, India and England, and through parts of the United States. These short pieces reveal new ways of belonging in the world and possibilities for an art grounded in a localized cosmopolitan culture.

The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

Kelsey St. Press

Poetry. Asian American Studies. In this new prose document, Bhanu Kapil follows a film crew to the Bengal jungle to re-encounter the true account of two girls found living with wolves in 1921. Taking as its source text the diary of the missionary who strove to rehabilitate these orphans--through language instruction and forcible correction of supinated limbs--HUMANIMAL functions as a healing mutation for three bodies and a companion poiesis for future physiologies. Through wolfgirls Kamala and Amala, there is a grafting: what scars down into the feral opens out also into the fierce, into a remembrance of Kapil's father. The humanimal text becomes one in which personal and postcolonial histories cross a wilderness to form supported metabiology. "Lucidly, holographically, your heart pulsed in the air next to your body; then my eyes clicked the photo into place. Future child, in the time you lived in, your arms always itched and flaked. To write this, the memoir of your body, I slip my arms into the sleeves of your shirt. I slip my arms into yours, to become four-limbed."

A Project for Future Children

Humanimal

An evocative exploration of body and politics by one of our most exciting innovative writers. Bhanu Kapil's Ban en Banlieue follows a brown (black) girl as she walks home from school in the first moments of a riot. An April night in London, in 1979, is the axis of this startling work of overlapping arcs and varying approaches. By the end of the night, Ban moves into an incarnate and untethered presence, becoming all matter-- soot, meat, diesel oil and force--as she loops the city with the energy of global weather. Derived from performances in India, England and throughout the U.S., Ban en Banlieue is written at the limit of somatic and civic aims.

Ban en Banlieue

"At the limit of house, of loss, at the edge of language, at the exhaustion of identity and text, Bhanu Kapil brings her shadow of a girl in and out of being, making of her a structure that is relation. Here in this radiant work of prose, the cyborg, the monster, the immigrant finds a future existence, a vibrant bleeding color brought forth by the multiple disjuncts that the book (and history) insists upon. Poised between pre-life and the notebook, between country and idea of country, in the mirror between addresser and addressee is the body that might exist in time. A work of global fiction, Incubation: A Space for Monsters extends its own faltering reach to offer the (various) other: a body, an accompaniment in language and ultimately a watery site of inscription to touch." -- Back cover.

Bhanu Kapil Rider

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