Amy Sara Carroll, "UNDOCUMENTATION REMEXED"

In response to the Trump administration’s populist nationalism, renegotiation of NAFTA, and family separation and prevention-through-detention immigration policies, Amy Sara Carroll presents “UNDOCUMENTATION/REMEXED.” Describing “undocumentation” as both a method and an archive of activist-artist practices tied to re-imagining the Mexican-US borderlands, Carroll discusses how artists have challenged the New World Order’s privileging of open markets, weaponization of the landscape, and criminalization of the working poor as well as Latinx and undocumented people. In a three-part presentation, Carroll retells the history of “undocumentation” through the lens of select artists’ work while reflecting on her own participation in the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT). She concludes with notes on the limits of the concept relative to current representations of the evolving “migrant crisis” at the México-US border.

Amy Sara Carroll is the author of SECESSION (Hyperbole Books, 2012);FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography (Fordham UP, 2013), chosen by Claudia Rankine for the 2012 Poets Out Loud Prize; andREMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era (University of Texas Press, 2017), selected for an honorable mention by the 2018 committee for the LASA Mexico Award for Best Book in the Humanities; an honorable mention by the 2018 committee for the MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Association for the Arts of the Present 2018 book award. Since 2008, she has been a member of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, coproducing the Transborder Immigrant Tool. She coauthored [({   })] The Desert Survival Series/La serie de sobrevivencia del desierto (Office of Net Assessment/University of Michigan Digital Environments Cluster Publishing Series, 2014). Published under a Creative Commons license, the volume has been digitally redistributed by CTheory Books (2015), the Electronic LiteratureCollection 3 (2016), CONACULTA E-Literatura/Centro de Cultura Digital (2016), and HemiPress (2017). Since 2010, Carroll has participated in SOMA in Mexico City. Carroll was a 2017-2018 Fellow in Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities. Currently, she is a 2018-2019 Fellow in the University of Texas at Austin’s Latino Research Initiative. Fall 2019, she’ll join the New School of New York City’s Department of Literary Studies where she’ll teach literature and creative writing.