"Fugitive Authorships: Social Contracts and the UndocuBlack Everyday" is an interdisciplinary project that engages discourse analysis, auto-ethnography, memoir-writing, poetry, affect theory, and Black performance theory, alongside textual analysis to critically examine literary and visual culture produced by undocumented Black immigrants (“undocuBlack”) living and producing work in the United States between 2005-2020. The research asks: what are the social contracts that undocuBlack migrants must abide by in the United States despite their lack of political representation and legal protection? Through this question, I examine what I term the undocuBlack everyday, and read for moments of undocuBlack nonperformance, described as acts that dislocate and unsettle the nonconsensual performance contracts of meritocracy, innocence, patriotism, “good moral character,” compulsory heterosexuality, monogamy, and binary gender roles that undocuBlack migrants are measured against. This dissertation often takes the form of the cultural artifacts analyzed. "Fugitive Authorships: Social Contracts and the UndocuBlack Everyday" contributes to the fields of undocumented studies, Black and Indigenous cultural studies, settler-colonial studies, and transgender studies.
