Summary

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.” 

Contents

VHS (translator’s note)

I was born unfinished

< sequence 1

interlude /

a second (sequence) >

we the people

matt damon’s resemblance (a sonata)

what is a title page?

a brief layover (cary grant with his pants down)

close, up

Author

Chris Campanioni was born in Manhattan and grew up in a very nineties New Jersey. The son of exiles from Cuba and Poland, Campanioni is a writer, multimedia artist, and instructor. He is a recipient of the International Latino Book Award for his debut novel, Going Down (Aignos, 2013); the Pushcart Prize for “Soft Opening” from his cross-genre collection Death of Art (C&R Press, 2016); and the 2013 Academy of American Poets College Prize. 

Reviews

What is this work? A montage? An autotheory? A seminar? A cc (certified copy, carbon copy, Chris Campanioni)? A counterfiction? A translation of North by Northwest? Unprocessed footage? A scrapbook? An overused VHS? A theater of voices? An illness memoir? A deconstruction of genre? A glossary? An annotation of another book? A critique of literary hybridity? The memory of a playbill? A continuous beginning again? A presentation? A premie (unfinished) text? An immigrant narrative? Rim job poetics? Hole-fever diasporic? A cross-cultural exchange? Yes! This work is a tour-de-force of creative critical praxis, a work that establishes a new genre for exiles and immigrants, a machine for generating ideas and encouraging speculation. north by north/west is constantly positing what it might be and do by questioning labels, genres, and sources in ways that open up current academic discourse. There is nothing else that I know of quite like this. 

—Christine Hume, author of Everything I Never Wanted to Know