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 MAY 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
“Chris Campanioni’s north by north/west is a conceptually roving surveillance of the self through the language of technology and mechanical reproduction. Evading classification at every turn, this deeply associative text is migratory and nationless, if genre can be understood as a state from which to emigrate. As an inheritor of exile whose parents’ narratives of expatriation remain unspoken, a new kind of autobiographical intimacy—autobiography understood here as inherently compromised by systems of power—is generated not through radical (self-)disclosure, but rather an elliptical burrowing down into ideas about origins and hybridity revealed in daring feats of juxtaposition. The reader becomes naturalized to a brazenly original source code for thinking about borders and translation, the in-between body and its positionality in a world where mobility is often violently policed. Campanioni’s writing—in the form of personal and intellectual contraband—deepens and dazzles in this remarkable performance. ”
—Richard Scott Larson, author of The Long Hallway
“For Chris Campanioni, memory is a kind of rewinding of the tape of one’s life—a tape whose production we rarely have a say in—but the rewinding is power in itself as it keeps alive something irrevocably lost.”
—Eric Dean Wilson, author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort