Chris Campanioni – författare

Today’s aesthetic strategies to compose content and identity across digital media are neither new nor exclusively digital, but emerged from migration. In Drift Net: The Aesthetics of Literature and Media in Migration, Chris Campanioni theorizes an aesthetics of transmedia as a framework for civic activism, while showing how migrants have forecasted and reshaped new media practices and norms, producing a political subjectivity that resists subjectification. As borders, global inequality, racism, and xenophobia proliferate, migrants continue to enact the possibilities of something else, beyond being spoken about and spoken for. Through a model Campanioni calls a “migratory text,” Drift Net advances a theory of literature and art born in translation that calls into question established theories of world literature, national literatures, literary periodization, and translation itself. Through an analysis of works born in translation and produced in passage, detention, and exile, Campanioni utilizes this model to read creatively across a wide range of social and political formations, from the experience of his parents' exiles to alternative housing initiatives and asylum reform efforts throughout Europe, including the largest LGBT+ refugee center in the world. Drawing on a mixed methodology of qualitative interviews with asylum applicants and shelter directors, textual analysis, and autoethnographic narrative, Drift Net traces literary developments alongside contemporary social and political interventions. This approach proposes interventions on the organizational levels of asylum, integration, public housing, and membership. It also marks the ways migrant creators have reformulated subjectivity through the same genres and modes that have contributed to their devaluation as minoritized subjects. Drift Net both deepens and broadens our conceptualization of migrant literature, and recovers an understanding and application of transmedia that predates digital cultures. Campanioni offers a wide-ranging study of texts including Edward Said and Jean Mohr’s After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, Edgar Garcia’s Skins of Columbus, Anna Seghers’s Transit, Francis Ponge’s Soap, Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group, Klára Hosnedlová’s embroidered paintings, Reem Karssli and Caroline Williams’s Now is the Time To Say Nothing, Cornelia Schleime’s paper prints, and more. Drift Net formulates the “migratory” as a site of artistic production, resistance, and possibility, where theory is not an end but the beginning of tools and practices that might help researchers, instructors, and organizers to develop their strategies.

north by north/west is a hybrid work of creative nonfiction assembled as several iterative sequences—a discontinuous itinerary—of exile. Harnessing both montage and collage to represent the incohesive experience of being between cultures, categories, and language, this book is a personal, critical, and autoethnographic exploration of diasporic identity formation and creative expression amidst the cultural and political impacts of Cold War colonialism and fragmentation. As the narrator begins work on a rough translation of the 1959 film North by Northwest, focal points surface through textual correspondences with distant coordinates, shifting between close readings of Whitney Houston’s early music videos, current events reportage, illness journals, eighties spy movies, the most recent solar eclipse, Alfred Hitchcock’s unproduced films, Cold War “stay-behind operations,” an ill-fated party at the Festival de Cannes, and family accounts of migration. These meticulously arranged narrative threads—harnessing elements of a novel alongside poetry, photographs, and field notes—attempt to discompose the epistemology of the West/Global North in order to conceptualize a genre of work by the children of exiles who have been called “the post-dictatorship generation.”