Humanimal: A Project for Future Children. This item is unavailable.Humanimal: A Project for Future Children

In this new prose document, Bhanu Kapil follows a film crew to the Bengal jungle to re-encounter the true account of two girls found living with wolves in 1921. Taking as its source text the diary of the missionary who strove to rehabilitate these orphans--through language instruction and forcible correction of supinated limbs--HUMANIMAL functions as a healing mutation for three bodies and a companion poiesis for future physiologies. Through wolfgirls Kamala and Amala, there is a grafting: what scars down into the feral opens out also into the fierce, into a remembrance of Kapil's father. The humanimal text becomes one in which personal and postcolonial histories cross a wilderness to form supported metabiology. "Lucidly, holographically, your heart pulsed in the air next to your body; then my eyes clicked the photo into place. Future child, in the time you lived in, your arms always itched and flaked. To write this, the memoir of your body, I slip my arms into the sleeves of your shirt. I slip my arms into yours, to become four-limbed."

Bhanu Kapil is the author of five works of poetry/prose: THE VERTICAL INTERROGATION OF STRANGERS (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), INCUBATION: A SPACE FOR MONSTERS (Leon Works, 2006), HUMANIMAL: A PROJECT FOR FUTURE CHILDREN (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), SCHIZOPHRENE (Nightboat Books, 2011), and BAN EN BANLIEUE (Nightboat Books, 2015). 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 at Naropa University.