Books by Bhanu Kapil

Ban en Banlieue

by Bhanu Kapil

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.

Incubation: A Space for Monsters

by Bhanu Kapil

Poetry. Cross-Genre. Asian American Studies. In INCUBATION: A SPACE FOR MONSTERS, Bhanu Kapil "explores/creates a shiftful place for she who is neither one thing nor another. Girl as hybrid of light and dark, of human and machine, of baby and mother, of all motherless, body-bound things. Laloo is a traveler, hitchhiking through landscapes American and otherwise. A frightening, transforming, longing book."—Rebecca Brown

This work "celebrates the cobbling together of lives-tracing the simplest desires to connect bodies, words, cultures, just as they threaten to become prosthetic, amputations. With a global body and sharp mind, Bhanu Kapil maps the poetic, exhilarating journey between pain and insight. A true landmark."—Thalia Field

Schizophrene

by Bhanu Kapil

Schizophrene traces the intersections of migration and mental illness as they unfold in post-Partition diasporic communities. Bhanu Kapil brings forward the question of a healing narrative and explores trauma and place through a somatic, poetic and cross-cultural psychiatric enquiry. Who was here? Who will never be here? Who has not yet arrived and never will? Towards an arrival without being, this notebook-book returns a body to a site, the shards re-forming in mid-air: for an instant.

Shahzia Sikander Collective Behavior

by Fred Moten, Bhanu Kapil, Aruna Dsouza, Victoria Sung, Rosalind Morris

The definitive publication on internationally acclaimed artist Shahzia Sikander, one of the most influential feminist artists working today

Born in Pakistan and active in New York since the 1990s, Shahzia Sikander navigates the interplay of multiple identities, encompassing a range of artistic disciplines in her work and critically reinterpreting South Asian material history. Sikander's distinctly feminist iconography focuses on the narratives of immigrant women to challenge Eurocentric art histories and counter Orientalist scholarship. This volume, published to coincide with a major mid-career retrospective that premiered during the Biennale Art in Venice and will be held concurrently at the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art, is the first comprehensive exploration of Sikander's ideas and art. With hundreds of images, many presented as a full page or an entire spread, the richly illustrated book immerses readers in Sikander's vibrant and subversive art.