Ban en Banlieue [Paperback]

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 forceas 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.Endorsements:Time Out New York chooses Ban en Banlieue as one of their most anticipated books of 2015Review QuotesThe project is presented as an abandoned novel that reads as a document of Kapils 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 Bans 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 authors 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.Publishers WeeklyIt is not a novel so much as a birth, a death, a violent discharge. It was born from an accumulation, a messy building up of notes which wasaccording to Kapilassembled by chopping it up on a butchers block. The body of Ban En Banlieue was assembled through violence, a body assembled by means of its own violent deconstruction. Even unto itself, this might seem like a self-contradiction that cannot be reconciled. Kapils beautiful, bleeding, half-dying, half-living, anti-novel is well aware of this.Meghan Lamb, Entropy MagazineGalleys sent to print magazines in advance of publication, finished blso