“A historian of the soft tissue”: An Interview with Bhanu Kapil

Responding to the question of what it means for their conversation to be commissioned for this handbook, Kapil provides five possible “instructions” ending with the tentative inference that “[m]igration literature is everything from no book to all these possible books, perhaps.” Reflecting on political contexts from the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent to Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, Kapil synthesizes the last section’s interests by asking: “Is repair the work of the book? Is a book another kind of ruined or abandoned home?” The interview addresses Kapil’s note-taking as “an art form,” the prompts for producing each of her works and the materials used in the process, the significance of (in)completion, radical “ultra-linearity,” and documentary experimentations, among other striking issues. Its most provocative statement, one that opens new horizons for thinking of the political work of literary experimentation with respect to the history of migration, is perhaps its concluding one: “Poetry has become a tool, you could say, something like an archaeological tool rather than an activity of form.”