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  • Housing the Stranger:Feminist Sheltering in the Work of Bhanu Kapil
  • Georgina Colby (bio)

Bhanu Kapil has emerged in recent years as a leading figure in contemporary avant-garde writing. Kapil's works address key sociopolitical issues affecting immigrant and migrant groups through their aesthetic politics of literary experimentation. Exploring migration and racialization, they present modes of unethical and ethical hospitality and touch on a key issue of UK and US politics in the twenty-first century: who receives or does not receive political hospitality.

In the United Kingdom and the United States, immigration has been a pivotal issue shaping referenda and elections. In the decade since the former British Prime Minister Teresa May ushered in the Conservative Party's policy of creating a "hostile environment for illegal immigrants" and the former US Republican president Donald Trump constructed nearly five hundred miles of barriers along the southern border with Mexico in New Mexico and Arizona, ideas of unwelcoming have dominated right-wing political discourse in both countries. Questions surrounding safe and unsafe spaces of refuge―the forms of hospitality people seeking asylum encounter once they arrive in either country―have been less prevalent in the dominant lines of political debate. Today, considering the controversies surrounding the conditions at immigration processing [End Page 24] centers (e.g., Manston in the United Kingdom) and the uncertainty asylum seekers experience in the temporary and often overcrowded accommodations offered to them, questions about hospitality, safe spaces, and sanctuary are ever more pressing.

This essay brings Kapil's work into dialogue with Sara Ahmed's recent theoretical work on hospitality. First, it draws on Kapil's most recent poetry collection, How to Wash a Heart, which lays bare the modes of what Ahmed terms the "conditional hospitality" at work in contemporary culture. The speaker of the poem in How to Wash a Heart is located in a conditional space that demands reciprocity. Second, through close attention to Kapil's avant-garde form, this essay examines how her earlier texts―The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Humanimal: A Project for Future Children, Schizophrene, and Ban en Banlieue―contest conditional forms of hospitality through a practice of feminist sheltering, whereby the poet constructs sites of aesthetic sanctuary through avant-garde textual practice. These texts predating How to Wash a Heart can be read as sites of nonreciprocity that operate as feminist shelters. Taking an architectural and spatial approach, this essay suggests that Kapil builds sites of aesthetic and textual sanctuary through formal innovation using avant-garde methods of composition, such as feminist citation, nonmediation, experimental spatialization of text, nonlinear textual composition, linguistic opacity and aesthetic abstraction, and the incorporation of photographs and performances through collage. These compositional materials, techniques, and designs create sites of nonreciprocity that shelter the subjects in those spaces from the intersubjective demands for reciprocity and transparency that host cultures inflict upon migrant subjects. Significantly, by constructing textual forms of feminist shelter, Kapil's earlier works create new epistemic terrains of nonconditional care, laying the conditions for new forms of feminist hospitality in these spaces of shelter. These new forms of hospitality run counter to the conditional hospitality portrayed in How to Wash a Heart.

Troubling Poetic Space: Conditional Hospitality

In a dialogue on somatic practices with Jonah Mixon-Webster, published in the Yale Review in 2020, Kapil recalls experiencing "a kind of disillusionment with the avant-garde or experimental communities [End Page 25] where I found welcome when I first began to write and publish in the United States." Kapil states, "I feel as if I have been in service to whiteness" (Kapil and Mixon-Webster 115). In another context, the experience of inequality and servitude to whiteness that is inherent to problematic forms of hospitality pervades How to Wash a Heart, which takes up the relation between an immigrant guest and a citizen host. In the Afterword, Kapil sites the origin of the collection's host-guest chemistry as something she read while scrolling through her newsfeed about a couple in California who had taken in an asylum seeker. Kapil explains: "The couple were white, self-identifying as progressive/liberal. They had adopted a daughter from the Philippines a few years earlier, and...

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