Ban En Banlieue

After having sat with and marinated with my impressions, I am still unsure exactly what Ban en Banlieue is. More fragments than novel, it's a book about gendered and racial violence, the tragic fragility of bodies, and the possibility of resistance. It's also about a murdered girl who becomes sentient ash. Bhanu Kapil does sorcery with her words, and the striking images she conjures will come to rest in your bones. Recommended By Cosima C., Powells.com

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 force—as 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.

"“Centered” around a race riot in 1979 London, Kapil’s text belies the notion of fixed centers or single origins of cultural violence. Instead, she offers a variety of emotional, psychological, and spiritual loci around which her text coalesces. To cry out. To fail. To rise like diesel smoke in a hot summer wind." Sueyeun Juliette Lee

"In Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue, place and its particular violences are memorialized in the body. The book considers Ban, a fictional girl from Kapil’s hometown in London’s suburbs and the protagonist of a novel Kapil began but never completed. Ban, who lies down to die in a race riot in 1979—an act repeated throughout the book she inhabits—is at once a single body, the absence of a body, and the presence of trauma in many bodies. In Ban Kapil is Ban but also isn’t; she uses her writing, protest, and performance art to expose the ambient violence she has experienced and carried since childhood." Davy Knittle

"Stunningly unique." Time Out New York

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 force--as 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.

An evocative exploration of body and politics by one of our most exciting innovative writers.

BHANU KAPIL is a British-Indian emigrant to the United States. She is the author of five full-length works of poetry/prose: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (2009), Schizophrene (2011), and Ban en Banlieue (2015). Since 2007, she has been incubating "Ban" through performances, talks, and collaborations in the U.S., India, and the U.K. She maintains a widely read blog on social incubation, prose experiments, and dogs: Was Jack Kerouac A Punjabi? She lives in Colorado where she teaches writing (through the monster, architecture, and memory) at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.