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.
Drift net is out in june 2025 from Lever Press. You can pre-order the book today through the university of michigan press’s website.
