Citizenship Violence, Illegality, and Abolition in the Undocumemoir

Abstract:This essay contributes a study of the undocumemoir to existing scholarship on undocu literature. I define the undocumemoir as an evolving literary form that transgresses literary boundaries and is distinguished by three defining characteristics: an engagement with immigration law and policy, a narrative arc of illegality, and the adoption of one or more generic conventions of established literary forms. I provide a reading of three recent undocumemoirs and argue that the undocumemoir departs from discussions of legal citizenship as full legal and political inclusion and show, instead, what I call citizenship violence and define as legal citizenship’s function as a mechanism to criminalize and contain migrants. I interpret the undocumemoir’s critique of citizenship violence as an incipient abolitionism invested in the creation of a borderless world that both echoes Black abolitionist and recent immigrant rights advocates’ critiques of legal citizenship, and invites a consideration of the liberatory potential in the rejection of legal citizenship.