2024/01/01 by Josue David Cisneros · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Diaspora, migration, transnational identity #Migration, Refugees, and Integration #Race, History, and American Society
paper · doi:10.14321/qed.11.2.0001
openalex publication_date 2024/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract This article analyzes several memoirs written by racialized, queer, and undocumented migrant activist artists to understand how they narrate the social and affective condition of being “alien,” and the strategies through which that marginalization is negotiated, survived, and resisted. The dialectical notion of “brownness” drawn from the work of José Muñoz and scholars of “brown” and undocuqueer rhetoric is central to this analysis. They help show how the undocumented activists’ memoirs move from the negation of brownness, caused by the “fragmenting violence” of white, heteronormative citizenship, to the negation of the negation, where brownness rhetorically problematizes both the conditions that cause queer migrants’ alienation and the predominant means of achieving disalienation through white hetero-/homonormativity. I trace the ways that these memoirs react to the stultifying normativity of liberal immigration politics through specific rhetorical and aesthetic strategies that exceed demands for visibility, recognition, and presence. Instead, they dwell in experiences of estrangement, celebrate queer forms of intimacy and community, and explore ways to convert what Sara Ahmed calls “alien affects” into forms of solidarity, survival, and resistance. Through this analysis of queer and undocumented migrant memoirs, the article contributes to our understanding of immigration politics, resistance, and coalitional rhetorics of “brownness.”