Description
Literary Nonfiction. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. How do we re-write American identity? Start by exploding the canon. Chris Campanioni begins by adapting (re-writing?) Henry James's The American and Gertrude Stein's "Americans" through an amalgam of annotations, observations, aphorisms, and asides, dissolving the boundaries between journal and novel, autobiography and fiction to enact the correspondence between all things when they are copied out. Then he goes further, imagining several other books inside this one, including an exploration of the ways in which "migrant illegality has been fabricated and shaped since September 11, and how these processes parallel the expansion of criminalization in an increasingly securitized and (border-) patrolled United States, and how this might inform a critical evaluation of technology's role in capturing and containing bodies: the specular and surveillant logic deployed for the divestment of human rights—to dispel bodies or, alternatively, to keep them in check."
More than anything else, it is this hypothesized convergence of the real, the not real, and the not yet real that propels A AND B AND ALSO NOTHING toward a blueprint for American identity built on errancy and errantry, hospitality and mutability, and a reevaluation of the exclusionary practices premised on the fetishization of origin and the original; the singularity of specialization. "Against nothing," Campanioni writes, "if not against expertise and the territorial character of art." In introducing the game and inviting all of us, A AND B AND ALSO NOTHING is both a call and a response to the avant-garde, an attention to the community of neo-mestizo writers and writers of color who have, consistently, been left out of its genealogy.
"...a writer without limits, as inexhaustibly experimental."—Miciah Hussey, CRUSHFanzine
"Besides being a nonfiction bestseller, A AN B AND ALSO NOTHING is also a literary critique, an exploration of rhetoric, and a rich and intimate personal narrative."—Davon Loeb, Los Angeles Review of Books
Author Bio
Chris Campanioni was born in Manhattan in 1985. He is the son of immigrants from Cuba and Poland and the author of seven books, including A AND B AND ALSO NOTHING (Otis Books | Seismicity Editions, 2020), THE INTERNET IS FOR REAL (C&R Press, 2019), and DEATH OF ART (C&R Press, 2016). Recent work has appeared in Ambit, Nat. Brut, Poetry International, RHINO Poetry, Hayden's Ferry Review, and DIAGRAM, and has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. He teaches at Pace University and Baruch College, and edits PANK, At Large Magazine, and Tupelo Quarterly. His selected poetry was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013, his novel Going Down was named Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece "This body's long (& I'm still loading)" was adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. In 2019, he was awarded a CHCI-Mellon Global Humanities Institute fellowship to join the Consortium for the Transnational Joint Research Center for Migration, Logistics, and Cultural Intervention.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA