Housing the Stranger: Feminist Sheltering in the Work of Bhanu Kapil
Georgina Colby 2023. Housing the Stranger: Feminist Sheltering in the Work of Bhanu Kapil. Contemporary Literature. 64 (1), pp. 24-51.
Georgina Colby 2023. Housing the Stranger: Feminist Sheltering in the Work of Bhanu Kapil. Contemporary Literature. 64 (1), pp. 24-51.
| Title | Housing the Stranger: Feminist Sheltering in the Work of Bhanu Kapil |
|---|---|
| Type | Journal article |
| Authors | Georgina Colby |
| Abstract | This essay takes a spatial and architectural approach to questions of shelter and hospitality to argue that Bhanu Kapil constructs safe textual spaces and sites of aesthetic sanctuary for migrants, and those experiencing forced migration, through experimental poetic practice. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, the essay argues that Kapil’s most recent collection of poetry, How to Wash A Heart (2020), exposes the forms of ‘conditional hospitality’ experienced by migrants both within domestic spaces of apparent refuge, and within institutions. In spaces of conditional hospitality, migrants are housed but unsheltered from the unethical demands for transparency and reciprocity. Through close attention to Kapil’s avant-garde form, this essay suggests that Kapil’s texts The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (2001), Humanimal: A Project for Future Children (2009), Schizophrene (2011) and Ban en Banlieue 2015) operate as feminist shelters, in which new forms of feminist hospitality emerge. Part of Kapil’s textual architectural practice involves creating and fortifying safe textual spaces through non-reciprocity. Kapil’s avant-garde compositional practices: the exposure of feminist and anti-colonial materials through the open-plan text; the use of the epistemological opacity of colour and aesthetic abstraction; avant-garde spatialisation; and the use of the visual space of the photograph and the space of performance through collage, create non-reciprocal sites that provide those within the texts with spaces of aesthetic sanctuary from the local hostile environment. Kapil’s feminist sheltering functions to contest conditional hospitality, creating the conditions for that which NourbeSe Philip understands as ‘radical hospitality’. In doing so, Kapil models a future ethical politics of hospitality and care. |
| Journal | Contemporary Literature |
| Journal citation | 64 (1), pp. 24-51 |
| ISSN | 1548-9949 |
| 0010-7484 | |
| Year | 2023 |
| Publisher | University of Wisconsin Press |
| Web address (URL) | https://muse.jhu.edu/article/923519 |
| Publication dates | |
| Published | 09 Apr 2024 |