Manchester University Press
20 ‘I want a literature that is not made from literature’
Abstract
In this article, Joey Frances considers the infra-linguistic registers at work in Bhanu Kapil's multigenre text, Ban en Banlieue (2015). Frances reads Kapil's multigenre text as ‘performance-gesture’: an offering of failure and exhaustion, which responds to conditions of sexualised and racialised violence without reproducing the oppressive structures of representation that perpetuate those conditions. As such, gesture is reimagined as an intersubjective intervention of anti-racist solidarities.
Abstract
In this article, Joey Frances considers the infra-linguistic registers at work in Bhanu Kapil's multigenre text, Ban en Banlieue (2015). Frances reads Kapil's multigenre text as ‘performance-gesture’: an offering of failure and exhaustion, which responds to conditions of sexualised and racialised violence without reproducing the oppressive structures of representation that perpetuate those conditions. As such, gesture is reimagined as an intersubjective intervention of anti-racist solidarities.
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures vii
- List of contributors x
- Acknowledgements xvii
- Foreword xix
- Introduction 1
- I Scrawl 25
- 1 The intelligent hand 27
- 2 Without word without voice blind gesture 36
- 3 ‘Language, of course, being gesture’ 47
- 4 Writing dreaming drawing 59
- II Caress 73
- 5 Perversions at her adolescent fingertips, or, Francesca Woodman’s autoerotic attentions 75
- 6 The massage is the medium 92
- 7 Et in arcadia xerox 99
- III Mutter 113
- 8 My chimeras 115
- 9 Speaking silence 122
- 10 Mamaiaith 130
- 11 Cliché is the sediment of sentiment that collects in my ear 139
- 12 ‘The strength of the gesture to move like a poem’ 148
- IV Scratch 163
- 13 My skin is a riot 165
- 14 Cutting into unmarked pleasures 184
- 15 Learning from silent teachers 197
- 16 Returning to the scene of hurt 206
- V Reach 219
- 17 Gestures for feminist transmissions 221
- 18 Between the departures and arrivals 231
- 19 Feminism’s un/common rituals 242
- 20 ‘I want a literature that is not made from literature’ 251
- VI Dialogues on gesture 265
- 21 ‘Flight [Gestures] in a Galaxy of Centres’ 267
- 22 So many social things happen with a bent head 286
- 23 In excess of the one, two 296
- 24 Gesture, a build 312
- Afterword 317
- Index 322
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents v
- List of figures vii
- List of contributors x
- Acknowledgements xvii
- Foreword xix
- Introduction 1
- I Scrawl 25
- 1 The intelligent hand 27
- 2 Without word without voice blind gesture 36
- 3 ‘Language, of course, being gesture’ 47
- 4 Writing dreaming drawing 59
- II Caress 73
- 5 Perversions at her adolescent fingertips, or, Francesca Woodman’s autoerotic attentions 75
- 6 The massage is the medium 92
- 7 Et in arcadia xerox 99
- III Mutter 113
- 8 My chimeras 115
- 9 Speaking silence 122
- 10 Mamaiaith 130
- 11 Cliché is the sediment of sentiment that collects in my ear 139
- 12 ‘The strength of the gesture to move like a poem’ 148
- IV Scratch 163
- 13 My skin is a riot 165
- 14 Cutting into unmarked pleasures 184
- 15 Learning from silent teachers 197
- 16 Returning to the scene of hurt 206
- V Reach 219
- 17 Gestures for feminist transmissions 221
- 18 Between the departures and arrivals 231
- 19 Feminism’s un/common rituals 242
- 20 ‘I want a literature that is not made from literature’ 251
- VI Dialogues on gesture 265
- 21 ‘Flight [Gestures] in a Galaxy of Centres’ 267
- 22 So many social things happen with a bent head 286
- 23 In excess of the one, two 296
- 24 Gesture, a build 312
- Afterword 317
- Index 322
