&Now 2019 Conference

Throughout the conference (and in conjunction with a panel featuring performance, critical talks, and discussions of the book) we would like to exhibit copies of CURB by Divya Victor. Produced by Aaron Cohick of The Press at Colorado College, CURB is an artists’ book made through the convergence between documentary poetics and the possibilities of structure and legibility in the handmade book. The binding is a double-sided accordion-fold spine, with sewn-in chapbooks and fold-outs. The printing incorporates a traditional, carefully crafted approach to typography and letterpress printing; a complete reversal of those traditions through repetitive overprinting; and direct rubbings made from sidewalks and curbs, imprinting the pages with a textural trace of concrete.

The book explores how racial and national identities diverge, rupture, and converge in the threshold zones of semi-public spaces—sidewalks, verges, lawns—and in places of quotidian consumption—gas stations, bars, green spaces—which it understands as sites of discipline and surveillance. CURB documents the killing and assault of Indian-Americans and Indian immigrants in post Reagan America through to the Trump era to query how urban spaces defend against the foreign subject so as to mark and claim a pending corpse or carceral entity.

Making copies of the book available for attendees to interact with would allow them to explore the author and book artist’s engagement with how we imagine ourselves as converging and diverging in shared, public spaces. How does “nationhood,” as a production, attempt to manage, curb, or fetishize ongoing cultural convergence through acts of violence? How do these acts unfold in shared public spaces? How might a book’s architecture and facture open multiple layers of reading, challenge oppressive habits of textual engagement and sense-making, and welcome collaboration and convergent peership through reading practices and physical engagement with the book?