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.”
north by north/west is out in the spring of 2025 from West Virginia University Press. You can pre-order the book today.
“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