Ban en Banlieue
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
One of Time Out New York's Most Anticipated Books of 2015
An evocative exploration of body and politics by one of our most exciting innovative writers.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her fifth collection, Kapil (Schizophrene) offers an uncategorizable look at an afternoon in April 1979, when a dark-skinned girl named Ban is walking home from school through a suburb (banlieue in French) of London at the start of a race riot. She hears breaking glass and "understands the coming violence has begun. Is it coming from the far-off street or is it coming from her home? Knowing that either way she's done for she lies down to die." Though Ban is fictional, her historical context is not; the immigrant suburbs of late-1970s London function both as a setting and a manner of "detailing which is to say: scouring/burnishing the world grew up in." The project is presented as an abandoned novel that reads as a document of Kapil's expansive and varied process of researching, planning, and writing. "A brown girl on the floor of the world" is the central image, and the porous relationship between Ban's story and the story of Kapil writing and thinking about Ban is fundamental throughout. Kapil casts and recasts descriptions of Ban alongside documentation of the author's own acts of lying down, undertaken through performances, protests, and somatic exercises. The result is a complex and deeply engaged "literature that is not made from literature."
