CUSAS seminar with Dr. Elizabeth Rubio (University of California, Riverside)

The Illegally Well Graphic Novel and Un-planner: On Collaboration, Undocumented Temporality, and Ethno-Graphic Storytelling

 

Undocumented Thai American artist and activist Bo Thai is wary of undocumented resilience narratives. The sequence of maddeningly arbitrary events that has kept him from accessing legal immigration status in the US has made him critical of the idea that undocumented people should live lives of endurance – that is, a life in which the present is perpetually deferred to a promised moment of future relief in the form of papers. In this talk, Elizabeth Rubio will discuss how ten years of collaborative work with Bo has culminated in co-authorship of a graphic novel that employs speculative fiction to explore how undocumented status and immigrant justice activism structure relationships to time.  In addition to demonstrating how ethnographic and artistic co-theorization has led her and Bo to develop an understanding of undocumented activist temporality that challenges dominant depictions of undocumented movement life, Dr. Rubio will discuss the challenges and possibilities of ethnographic storytelling through visual mediums and activist-academic collaboration. 

 

Elizabeth Rubio, an anthropologist based at UC Riverside. She’s currently working on a graphic novel with an undocumented Thai American artist. The project uses speculative fiction to explore how immigration status shapes undocumented people’s relationships to time, while also offering a critique of “resilience” narratives and certain strands of the immigrant justice movement.