Undocumented. Black. Citizen.

A Transnational One-day Symposium Featuring a Performance by Josefina Báez

Hosted by Professor Lorgia García Peña in collaboration with Medhin Paolos

Brings together scholars, activists, and artists from Europe, Latin America, Africa and the United States to think together about the relational and transnational experiences of people who identify as Black and immigrant (or descendants of immigrants) and who are living in diasporic communities in Europe and the Americas. Centering Black immigrant lives in dialogue with other minoritized people (Asian, indigenous, and mixed race Latinx) through a humanistic and artistic lens, the panelists will speak to the intersections of anti-blackness and xenophobia shaping citizenship exclusion across the Globe, and share some of the important lessons learned through their work, while connecting contemporary artistic and social movement across geographies. The symposium is envisioned as a first step in a series of events and projects aimed at advancing a conversation about global anti-blackness and xenophobia on Princeton University campus.

The United States occupies a paramount place in the global imaginary of blackness. The legacy of Black freedom struggles in the United States have shaped how Black communities across the globe think about revolution and anti-colonial struggles and liberation. The language and symbols that have emerged from the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights Movement (Black is beautiful, a raised fist) to the present (#Black Lives Matter) have allowed Black people across the globe to engage transnationally and, at times, to find a way to share their own struggles beyond the local. Likewise, the immigrant movement in the United States, particularly as embodied in the figure of the DREAMer, has resonated worldwide. Symbols like the monarch butterfly, and slogans like “Undocumented and Unafraid” resonate in places like Italy and Haiti, as immigrants and children of immigrants demand their right to belonging and citizenship. And while in the United States these two struggles—the one for Black lives and the one for immigrant rights—are often seen parallel and confronted as separate issues both in local and national politics, in other parts of the world Black and immigrant are often deployed as entangled categories of citizenship exclusion. That is, to be Black and citizen can be perceived an impossibility. Our symposium is then a contradiction to what is deemed impossible and a gesture towards imagining new connections, communities and possibilities for the future we seek to co-create.