Where you will find me: reflecting on and with Bhanu Kapil 14-15 Nov 2024

This week the amazing Poets & Critics will be hosting a 2 day event on and with the author Bhanu Kapil at Université Paris Cité, Bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, 8 rue Albert Einstein, 75013 Paris 9:45 am-5 pm, room OdG 830 (8th floor of the Olympe de Gouges Building). 

I have long admired Kapil's work, both as a poet and a critic. I am very much looking forward to getting to converse with her and other scholars about her work, and to attend the READING organized at Michael Woolworth's wonderful atelier space tomorrow night organized by Double Change with Bhanu Kapil, Nadid Belaatik & Catherine Weinzaepflen: ((info on that HERE)

If you would like to read some of the initial critical work I have written on Kapil, please visit my Academia.edu space:  https://uha.academia.edu/JenniferKDick Under the section "Papers/Chapters in English" you can download the PDF chapter from the Colors and Cultures book, which is also available for sale on Amazon. “The Dissenting Red Self: Lyn Hejinian's Tribunal, AnneCarson's Autobiography of Red & Bhanu Kapil's Incubation: A Space forMonsters” by Jennifer K Dick in Couleurs et Cultures /Colors and Cultures: Interdisciplinary Explorations eds Sami Ludwig, AstridStarck-Adler & André Karliczek. 2022. ISBN: 978-3-00-073026-9. (364 p), pp.143-152.

 And if you remain interested in what I am thinking and writing about Kapil, I will have a chapter which is on her and Eleni Sikelianos in this forthcoming book:

Forthcomingin early 2025 : Dick, Jennifer K “TheNonsingular Self: A study of Bhanu Kapil and Eleni Sikelianos’ PoeticAutobiographical Writing” in  Vulnerabilityand radicality in contemporary British and American autobiographies, eds Nelly Monk & Aude Haffen. Presses Universitairesde Bordeaux. (slotted for first quarter of 2025 publication) 

I will also be hosting a one day journée d'étude on and in the presence of Bhanu Kapil on February 14, 2025 in Mulhouse, France. Here is the DRAFT of the CFP. The final version will begin to be posted online over the coming weekend, following the events here in Paris and potentially with additions or alterations to it based on the dialogues which take place in the coming days. Join me in Mulhouse for more on Kapil!

Draft of the CFP: Journée d’étude “TheSomatics of Bhanu Kapil’s Emigrant/Immigrant Line.” February 14, 2025,Université de Haute Alsace-Campus Illberg, Mulhouse, France. Organized with the support of the ILLE labo de Recherche and the English Dept of the Université de Haute Alsace.

 

“It is arrival in reverse to approach an ocean. Areyou an immigrant? Don’t panic, immigrant. There are places to curl up in undera cliff, in a cave, and in the morning you will be covered with starfishopening and closing all over your body. Encrusted, riveted, bright orange, whatwill you do? What will you do with your new body? What will you make it do?”–Kapil, Incubation (80)

 

The goal of this journée d’étude isto, in the presence of the author, begin positing what a critical poetics ofBhanu Kapil’swritings with a focus on issues of migration might look like. This is, however,to take migration as both physical and stylistic, including literary migrationbetween forms and formats of expression. For example, how Incubation: ASpace for Monsters could be read as a mode of re-visiting Donna Haraway’s ACyborg Manifesto or even rewriting it from the POV of the cyborg herself, whyfilming then writing in the location of the “Bengali Wolf Girls” gave rise to Humanimal:A Project for Future Children, or how, in Ban en Banlieue, a parallelarises in her many notes/instructions and the moments of placing her body (à laAna Mendieta) in a space, tracing it, filling that trace with flowers,examining the red flowers wilting and locating in that cycle of life/death “Abook of time, for time and because of it./A book for recovery from an illness.A book that repeats a sentence until that sentence recuperates its power toattract, or touch, other sentences./ A book as much poetry as it is a forbiddenor unfunded area of research.”

The body and thewritten line have always been intimately, intrinsically linked in Kapil’sworks. Foregoing the declarative, the stable, the conclusive, Kapil’s writinghas always been a form of open-ended interrogation, including works that evenemerge from asking others, and herself, a series of questions over and over, asin her first book Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. Kapil invitesreaders to engage, to enter, to be part of her texts. In this day and age, manyauthors explore hybrid genres and practices which expand into performance thenreturn to the book. Works which defy definition. What Kapil’s work does whichis unique to this exploration is to deny that any difference between on and offthe page, the written the read and the being written exist in any way asseparate from the body. The tactile materiality of the world itself andlanguage are one, as her citing of Alfonso Lingis’ Abuses opens Humanimal:“They open up a body that is a lesion in the tissue of words and discourses andthe network of powers”. As Kapil explains quite directly in an interview: “I want a form that […] lets the sentence be the placewhere the dirt, or fractal matter, of the diasporic body: might adhere.”

This conference willthus deliberately focus on a broad reading of the issues, stylistic aspects andechoes both on and off of the page of Bhanu Kapil’s writing and performancework as it relates specifically to the somatics of her immigrant/emigrant line.It invites new understandings to probe the more analytic end of Kapil’sintertextuality and mobility, including the way it exists in a dialogic spacewith works across a variety of genres, artistic mediums and themes. We invitecontributions on a range of topics, including, but not limited to:

- Questions regardingborders/citizenship and nomadism;

--Tandem issues withthe above focusing on emigration/immigration;

- Talks which take aspecific look at “the experiences of diaspora communities in India, England orAmerica”;

- Issues regardingmovement / migration and hitchhiking;

- The body: celebrating  and healing it, or its rejection, treatmentas “disposable”, in pain;

-The enigmatic inKapil: and its relationship to understanding, knowledge or inquiry;

- Kapil’s work as aform of trauma writing (or post-trauma writing);

- Questions of self-knowledgeand definition (or self-annihilation) in Kapil’s writing;

- The topic ofmind-body (care, health, attention, definition, etc.);

- Scars of language and body alongside notions of narrativesas potential modes for healing (both as read and written);

- Feminist issues inKapil;

- Kapil’s relationship to the(inside-out) Feminist Cyborg theories of Donna Haraway and (outside-in)cognitive science-based cyborg theories of Andy Clark.

- Kapil’s works as fictional(auto)biography;

- Questions ofotherness and monstrosity and/or Cyborgs in Kapil;

- the response tofolklore in Kapil’s work;

- Reflections on Kapil’sreinventions of genre, or even a perceived progression in her work;

- The interrogationof other (and self) in Kapil’s works;

- How the politicaland the artist coincide;

- Kapil’s works asforms of metamorphosis;

- Topics of memoryand temporality in Kapil;

- Intermedialmethodologies in her oeuvre (on and off the page);

            -Racism and violence in Kapil’s writing;

            -Hospitality and community vs assimilation;

            -Writing as a mode of healing;

            -The use and significance of specific colors in Kapil’s works;

            -Writingas a mode of becoming;

            -Kapil’s books as radical forms of travelogue.

 

Proposals (ca. 300-500 words) for 30-minutepapers and a biographical note should be sent to jennifer-kay.dick[at]uha.fr by 10 December 2024. We welcomeexperimental or creative-critical approaches to papers. The committee willcommunicate their decisions by 16 December 2024. Contributions will beconsidered for inclusion in a peer-reviewed volume or special issue of ajournal.

 

Organization and contact: JenniferK Dick (Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse)

 

Coordinating Committee:

BastienGoursaud (Université de Picardie Jules Verne)

Silya Bennamar(Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse)

BhanuKapil is the author of six full-length collections: The VerticalInterrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation:a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a projectfor future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat,2011), Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2015), and How toWash a Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020).Two new, non-identicaleditions of Incubation (out of print for seven years in theU.S.) were published by Prototype (UK) and Kelsey Street Press (USA) in 2023.Bhanu is based now in Cambridge, where she is an Extraordinary Fellow ofChurchill College, thinking and writiing [with] [near] [beneath] the archive ofEnoch Powell. She has been awarded a Cholmondeley Award, a Windham-CampbellPrize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. For twenty years, she taught seminars inexperimental writing, performance, and ritual at Naropa University. Currentmanuscripts include a novel, The Secret Garden, and anunpublishable work of creative non-fiction, Promiscuity. (Source: Bio taken from Poets & Critics https://www.poetscritics.org/ who organized a 2 day seminar-discussion and readingwith Kapil in Paris in Nov 2024. Some of the organizers from this event willshare the findings and outcome of their seminar with us).