“Undocu-comics and Unwellness: Graphic Narratives on Immigration, Land, Debility, and Fearlessness”

• In Event: Deviant Immigrant Legacies: Tactics against Fear

Abstract

Undocu-comics points at the intersection of graphic narratives and stories of migration that are tainted by the lack of papers and other modes of thwarted access to full citizenship. It also names the role of comedy as a tactic of resistance. Exploring graphic narratives of migration from Latin America and East Asia into the United States, this essay argues that the medium of comics can offer an account of fear and chronic stress as a social determinant of health disparities that helps visualize paths for care and restitution. From Lilliam Rivera and Steph H. 's Unearthed to Duncan Tonatiuh’s Undocumented: A Worker’s Fight, undocu-comics draw the bodymind and its relation to a sickening environment to map a set of tactics to get fear undone building coalition across nations of origin. From unions to community research, these narratives propose modes of thinking and paint infrastructure in which the bodymind engagement in non-verbal relation to the land(s) takes the forefront. Drawing from disability justice and radical health critical theory, this essay is an exploration of visual thinking regarding debility as essential to nation-state projects on occupied land and as a battleground for resistance and perhaps for the eventual flourishing of alternative modes of community care, as they foster the imagination and imaging of abolition politics.

Author

• Rocío Pichon-Rivière, UC Irvine