The Funambulist #51 Undocumented International jan-febr 2024

Undocumented International is determined to look at the spaces of the border regime well beyond the border itself (on both of its sides), while simultaneously looking at what the border crosses rather than at the people who cross it. It is dedicated to centering undocumented people’s autonomous political organizing beyond their interactions with the documented population (including Global North anti-racist activists who, for many, are born with a citizenship their parents or grandparents did not have). And finally, this issue deliberately favors a discourse that distinguishes between undocumented/documented from an often-assumed opposition between migration and Indigeneity, or even an automatic association between being undocumented and migration. In order to do so, it features contributions about/from the Dominican Republic and the US (Lauda Virginia Vargas), France (Mogniss H. Abdallah), South Africa (Kudakwashe Vanyoro), Britain (Loraine Masiya Mponela and Helen Brewer), Comoros (Maëva Amir), as well as a more comprehensive conversation about border imperialism (Harsha Walia) and the act of forging passports (Mahmoud Keshavarz and Shahram Khosravi). As for the cover (chosen from the agence IM’média archives), it features Sans-Papiers activists Camara Hamady, Madjiguène Cissé, and Aboubacar Diop in 1996 Paris. This issue contains two news from the fronts: a textual and pictorial envisioning of the “counter-plantation” in Barbados (Mackenzie Luke), and an account of the Save Brick Lane movement in East London (Tasnima Uddin and Syma Tariq).