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.
summer 2025, from Lever Press
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“A remarkable achievement … Bold, elegantly written, and breath-takingly ambitious, this book is illuminating and vital in a way few contemporary works manage to be. Chris Campanioni frictionlessly weaves links between many different areas and modes of thought for a study that—while theory-laden—reads smoothly, accessibly, and poetically. Grounded in the experiences of real people, Drift Net makes a strong case for peripheral cultural productions like the migratory text as a methodology for understanding, relating to and constructing alternative intersubjectivities that resist global hegemony. The book will be most valued by scholars in the humanities and those interested in better understanding the refugee crisis and how it connects to so much of modern media culture—in often unexpected ways!”
— José Alaniz, author of Comics of the Anthropocene: Graphic Narrative at the End of Nature
“Beautifully written and boldly interdisciplinary, Drift Net offers a timely and groundbreaking rethinking of the literary that bridges comparative literature, critical refugee studies, queer theory, and media studies. Campanioni illuminates the intersections of literature, migration, and digital media with striking insight and originality—revealing autobiographical storytelling as a form of activism that both precedes and reframes our digital age.”
— Kelley Kreitz, author of Electrifying News: A Hemispheric History of the Present in Modern Media