Abstracts

 Abstracts and key information for the ILLE Conférence and Journée d'étude
“The Somatics of Bhanu Kapil’s Emigrant/Immigrant Line.”

13 February 2025:

16h30 ILLE Conférence by Bhanu Kapil: « The Forest on the Border : Returning, Leaving, Returning Again » UHA, Salle Ganjavi, FLSH, 10 rue des frères lumières 68100 Mulhouse (Campus Illberg)

This conference will focus on two of Kapil’s current projects dealing with border consciousness. Recently returned to the UK after decades teaching at Naropa & Goddard College in the States, Kapil has been keeping what she calls “notes towards bordering”. This talk extends Kapil’s “The Secret Garden” project, involving stories of different places & a sense of dreaming & storytelling at the same time. Kapil is intrigued by ideas of what she calls “memories of being inside the performance” & reflects here on the parallels that

this elicits with immigrant life.

ILLE Conference short BIO: A British-American writer, performer & installation artist of Indian heritage, Kapil is based in Cambridge, where she is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, She has been awarded a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University & the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her books include: Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006; re-edited Kelsey Street Press/ Prototype, 2024), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat, 2011), Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2015), & How to Wash a Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020).

18h Vernissage « Se Faire Plaisir » Kunsthalle Mulhouse Centre d’Art Contemporaine, 16 rue de la Fonderie, Mulhouse.   

Se faire plaisir est une exposition qui veut se faire l’écho d’un plaisir qui passe par le partage ou le jeu, un plaisir qui se ressent par le corps, qui s’acquiert par les sens et parle à nos émotions. Artists : « WE ARE THE PAINTERS (WATP) » ; Caroline Achaintre ; Victor Alarçon et Nitsa Meletopoulos ; Mireille Blanc ; Clément Bouteille ; Stéphanie Cherpin ; Afra Eisma ; Camille Fischer ; Marianne Maric ; Cassidy Toner. Co-curated by Mireille Blanc, Marianne Maric, and Sandrine Wymann, Directrice de la Kunsthalle Mulhouse.

 

14 February 2025:  

Abstracts in order of presentation:

Amphi Weiss, Bâtiment des amphithéâtres - Université de Haute-Alsace6 rue frères lumières Mulhouse (Campus Illberg)

9h30 Panel 1: Performance to page: opening reflections on Kapil:
Chair: Fabrice Shultz (MCF, UHA)

Alev Ersan (independent artist, Istanbul/Paris)

“Processes of Weeding and Gardening: Bhanu Kapil’s Many forms of Writing”

Abstract: In a stylistically hybrid form using visuals, text-as-visual, I will speak to the particularities of the jungle/the forest/the garden/the outside space in Bhanu Kapil’s texts, in how these spaces/places relate to the border zone, to the dis/mis-placed immigrant body and to the time aspects of arrival vs growth, while also speaking to Kapil’s many forms of writing, as a kind of weeding and gardening, primarily focusing on Humanimal and Ban et Banlieu and the essay, “Lyric Violence, the Nomadic Subject and the Fourth Space Sandeep Parmar with Bhanu Kapil”. In doing this, I would like to include other writers, artists, and geographical spaces to tease out points of convergence.

I would like to start with the turn in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, where a forest begins to slowly—the time aspect being important, too—to grow in a childhood bedroom, the outside seeping into the interior, turning it inside out. The colour palette as well as Sendak’s own background, a child of Polish-Jewish immigrants to Brooklyn New York, making up his image-sound world is something to reflect back to Kapil’s meaning-making with colour and imagery. In staying with the forest I would also like to bring in the Petrified Forest in Lesvos, Greece https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5858/ thinking about how time unfolds in a fossilized forest, to trees as material witness in Georges Didi-Huberman’s book Écorces, (Bark, in the English translation, and Kabuklar in the Turkish, which was the one I read) on visiting the “museumified” Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, to Jumana Mana’s film “Foragers”, narrating what unfolds from restrictions brought on to the practice of foraging wild edible plants in the Palestinian/Israeli border by the Israeli nature protection laws. The outside, the jungle, the forest, the valley and then moving back towards the interior, the garden—defined by its fences, by what it lets in and leaves out. The garden as Eden. The fruit trees. In Rebecca Solnit’s words “Paradise is a walled garden defined by what it has shut out.” Also referencing parts of Orwell’s Roses for Solnit’s meandering through politics, language, and pleasure that speak to Kapil’s writing where one is pushed to read and sense everything that is at stake. Then finally, to close off with another garden book, I would like to go a little into Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature as a book in the form of a diary, a note taking, of politics, life, death and friendship, where the repetition of his observances of the garden create a rhythmic nuance.

Lily Beckett (University of Bristol, England)

Negotiating Borders: Between Performance and Writing in Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue (2014)

This paper mobilises analytical frameworks from the field intermedial studies to consider Bhanu Kapil’s prose-poem, Ban en Banlieue (2014), which closely incorporates aspects of live performance with written prose-poetry within the limits of the printed book.

Kapil, a British-Indian emigrant to the USA, “incubated” Ban through performances and installations across the USA, as well as in India and the UK, before its eventual publication in book form. Within its self-reflexive and fragmented narrative, Kapil as the poem’s speaker constantly crosses spatiotemporal borders: from London’s suburb of Southall in the 1970s, to New Delhi in the 2010s, to various USA cultural institutions in between. Like Kapil caught between England, India and the USA, Ban is a hybrid text: situated within “a novel-shaped space, the space of a book,” it consistently falls short of the novel form. These ‘failures’ (or ‘errors’, in Ban’s terms) emerge from the speaker’s self-conscious struggle to contain the text’s subject(s) – casualties of patriarchal and fascist violence, the particularities of growing up with brown skin in the margins of the imperial metropole – within the spaces that material circumstances compel Ban to predominantly inhabit: the book, the USA.

Bringing in approaches from intermedial studies designed to draw attention to traits of literary texts we might otherwise overlook, I investigate how the tensions and overlaps between live performance and written prose-poetry problematise normative divisions between the two, both exposing links between ‘worldly’ and ‘literary’ belonging and conditioning Ban’s explorations of migrant experience: “en banlieues: on the perimeter.”

11h15 Panel 2: Two Readings of Ban en Banlieue
Chair: Rasha ALSHBLI (UHA-ILLE)

Andrew Hodgson (Université Paris-Cité, France)

“A Novel-Shaped Space”: The Negative Capabilities of Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue

Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue (2015) is a contemporary expression of a long tendency within British literature whereupon an author comments on the workings, success or failure of their authorial project as that project is generated. In doing so, the writer creates a textual object in which the scaffolding of its writing becomes the writing itself. This is posed as the work of “a poet engaging a novel-shaped space” here, which is a familiar trope from this tendency within other historical contexts of British writing. On the one hand, one might think of the experimental novelist B. S. Johnson in the 1960s who, for example, listed his profession as “Poet” in his passport, and spoke of his novelish books as poetic projects. On the other, one might also think of a linchpin of the British novel tradition, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); a novel that emerged from the milieu of poetic romanticism.

At least of this latter, Kapil certainly would seem to do so. The language and imagery of Shelley’s 1818 novel is profoundly intertwined into Kapil’s literary project here. Just as Kapil creates the signifying “monster” of accumulated psychic parts that is the fictional Ban, who falls through the episodic impressions of the book in stead of the author herself, in seeking to create “a literature not made from literature,” Kapil creates a formal, textual, Frankenstein’s monster that takes the shapes necessary to house this late-anthropocene Prometheus embodied by the text.

Within the book, Kapil writes of a series of genre confusions, which the narrating-I struggles to reconcile. Is this narrating, authorial entity creating a sort of manifesto, or a novel, or a series of poems, or a diary, or an artistic performance of which this is simply catalogued documentation. It would appear that, for the reader, the index of genre-reception is indeterminate, and unclear. A core question prompted by the text, is that of how it, as a book, is to be read. It is a book of poetic impressions on paper that details an unfinished, unwritten, deleted, novel. As a poetic text haunted by a novel that does not, or cannot exist, this aesthetic impossibility becomes the anchoring that in turn seems to mutate the poetic episodes in this text indeed into a formally recognisable novel. The series of confusions and negations that proliferate through the book become a developmental network that reflexively generates a web of reception whereby novelishness is achieved, rather than collapses into aesthetic incoherency. This spectral sort of aesthetic reconciliation is reminiscent of the dossier of preparational parts of German theorist Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927-40) that became Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1982; 1999) following the disappearance of the completed manuscript of the Arcades Project (1940) along with its author. With this paper I will tease out elements of cross-genre collapse and thematic haunting in Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue, and in doing so test out avenues of critical approach to the novelishness created by the negative capabilities of Kapil’s poetic-prose writing.

 

Vivian Alividza (UHA Master 2 Anglais)

Fragmented identity: The interplay between “I” and “Her” as a dissociative response to trauma in Ban en Banlieue

Dissociation can be thought of as a continuum where, at one end, one has experiences such as daydreaming while, at the other end, a complete disconnect from reality exists—a disconnection from one’s own body and identity. A very strong link has been established between trauma and dissociation where trauma is thought to be the root cause of at least 90 percent of dissociative disorders. Trauma-related psychological dissociation has been explained as a form of escape which comes into play in situations where physical escape is not possible. In Ban en Banlieue, Ban (“Her”) is presented as a figure who is deeply marked by violence, racial injustice, and dehumanization, while the narrator (“I”) is presented as the figure who grapples with this trauma through fragmented narratives, performance, and other attempts at writing. The relationship between "I" and “Her/Ban” can be understood as a form of dissociation where the narrator's sense of self has become fractured in response to the overwhelming nature of Ban's traumatic experiences. This separation is most easily seen in passages where the narrator recalls disturbing childhood experiences but distances herself by attributing them to Ban. The “I” remembers the trauma fully but in fractures. Moreover, as she doesn’t seem to want to be connected to or associated with these events, she talks about them in a flat, monotone and unemotional manner. This talk will explore some of the ways Kapil structures this dissociation as a literary and psychological phenomenon linked to to Ban’s past traumatic experiences. 

 

Lunch Break

14h Panel 3: Two Readings of Schizophrene
Chair: Samuel Ludwig (Pr, UHA)

Matthew Rana (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis; Independent researcher in Stockholm)

A Sinthomatic Reading of Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene

“It is psychotic to go. / It is psychotic to look. / Psychotic to live in a different country forever. / Psychotic to lose something forever. / The compelling conviction that something has been lost is psychotic.” Thus writes Bhanu Kapil in her 2011 book Schizophrene, a work that, among other things, maps complex relationships between migration and madness. This paper will develop what I call a “sinthomatic reading” of Kapil’s book by taking its engagement with psychosis seriously. In contrast to so-called symptomatic reading which, broadly speaking, looks for the latent content of literary works, sinthomatic reading is a method of textual analysis aligned with what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, in his Seminar XXIII on James Joyce, termed the “sinthome.” Whereas the symptom in psychoanalysis is often understood as a manifestation of the subject’s inherent division, the sinthome instead attempts to capture the particular way that subjects organize and enjoy their unconscious. Yet it also designates the reparative potential of writing as a way to mend the unconscious structure – psychotic structure, in particular. I will draw on both of these senses in order to think alongside the ways that Schizophrene, as an act of symbolic inscription, paradoxically knots together with what resists symbolisation and holds together as a surface to which, as Kapil puts it elsewhere, “the diasporic body: might adhere.” 

Mantra Mukim (Eutopia-SIF; UMR Héritages, CYU Paris)

Glitchwork: Bhanu Kapil and the Circuitry of the Book

If glitch is a breakdown of the machine from within, through an unanticipated yet internal error, this creative-critical presentation will trace the relationship between glitch and book. Focusing specifically on Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue and Schizophrene, I intend to explore how the glitch is staged, received, repaired, and ultimately resigned to ‘the book’ in Kapil’s work. Here, the book is understood both in its organic and mechanical qualities. On the one hand, it is a living entity, prone to erosion and regeneration, as evidenced in Schizophrene, where the process of decay and renewal is integral to its form and meaning. On the other hand, the book has a composite quality, a structure built through minute acts of aggregation and redaction. This duality of the book—at once organic and mechanical—creates a fertile ground for examining the ways glitches manifest within it, both as disruptions and as creative opportunities.

Kapil’s work, I will argue, offers a compelling counter to the conventional regime of the book as a sovereign, self-contained text. By embracing the glitch—its weaknesses, errors, and breakdowns—Kapil displaces the book beyond the confines of the page. In her work, the glitch is not merely an error to be corrected but a transformative force that fractures the boundaries of the book, allowing it to extend into bodies, borders, and colors. Through this displacement, Kapil reimagines the book as a space of vulnerability and openness, challenging the traditional notions of textual authority and permanence. This presentation will thus engage with Kapil’s innovative approach, considering how the glitch, as both a literal and metaphorical phenomenon, reshapes our understanding of what a book can be and how it can act in the world.

15h45 Panel 4 Self/Other: reading outwards with Bhanu Kapil
Chair: Sid CAMPE (UHA-ILLE/ Université Mazarik (Brno))

Biswamit Dwibedy (American University of Paris)

Story form as critical introduction—Meeting Pinky Agarawalia

Bhanu Kapil writes novels. And with each novel, we, her readers, discover new things a novel can do. This paper will focus on the poet’s novel, drawing a lineage from Hilda Doolittle to Bhanu Kapil, tracing characters that transform and recur; forms that must fall apart to cohere and language that cannot help but fictionalize in order to tell the truth about the world in which we live. Kapils’s “novel” Meeting Pinky Agarawalia: Biography of a Child Saint in Ten Parts is available on Granta at https://granta.com/pinky-agarwalia/ .

Jennifer K Dick (UHA-ILLE, Mulhouse)

Coming Full Circle: Incubation: A(nother) Space for Monsters

Focused on the nomadic speaker and the return (with the republications) to Incubation: A Space for Monsters, this talk on transformative rebirth will explore the narrative forms of the avatar and of weaving the Self through the (monstrous?) (cyborg?) Other. Questions about invisibility, thus passing, thus cyborg, versus being over(hyper)visible, thus monstrous, will be addressed. I will look closely at the vibrant presence of color and the constant references to history, myth and visual artists which emerge at crucial moments of change for Kapil’s speakers. In the end, it will become evident that my talk is arcing towards a reflection about how Kapil tends towards a metafiction which speaks as much to the invisible struggle to write, to create, as to the voice and identity of her myriad images of “characters”:  travelers, immigrants, cyborgs, girls, women, family, refugees, victims, perpetrators, and artists. The methods of layering—of chance, destruction, recovery—will be touched on as I examine the circles and lines which become echoes within Kapil’s books but also which extend outwards towards “the whole world”, to the “I” which is “her” which is “you”, too.

 

Closing discussion with Bastien Goursaud (Université de Picardie Jules Verne)

Looking back at Poets & Critics; Looking forward to Kapil in translation: a moment to reflect on and discuss today with Kapil.

 

18h-20h          Retrospective Reading with Bhanu Kapil

Maison de l’étudiant, Hall d’entrée, 1 rue Alfred Werner, 68200 Mulhouse

Bhanu Kapil’s retrospective reading of her works will be accompanied by UHA Master students and visiting authors translations of extracts into numerous languages, including French, German, Tamil, Arabic, Kabyle, Armenian, Tamazight, Russian, Turkish and more. Readers include: Bastien Goursaud, Mohamed Tahar Arkab, Fatma Benhamou, Ludivine Delacote, Mannel Hammad, Dulakshika Kalaichelvan, Yanis Loukkad, Inès Messied, Thiziri Reurig, Bochra Mestari, Sirvard Mikaelyan, Camille Roussel, Arij Shaaban, Jean Walter and Alice Winling. Extracts from Schizophrene, Incubation: A Space for Monsters, Humanimal, How to Wash a Heart and Ban en Banlieue will be read.