I argue for a reconceptualization of undocumentedness, the experience of being undocumented, from an experience that is simply a result of the modern immigration regime to an experience that is a result of interlocking systems of oppression and resistance to them that has shaped Blackness and the vision for black liberation. I make this argument by defining and tracing the trope of the papers—the use of legal and extralegal documents to examine and document African Americans’ and other people of African descent’s relationship to the nation-state—in the slave narrative and the neo-slave narrative. I offer a close readings of slave narratives, including Sojourner Truth’s The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, and neo-slave narratives, including Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) and Gayl Jones’s Mosquito (1999), to illustrate the significance of the undocumented immigrant in African American literature and demonstrate that writers of African American literature have been thinking intensely about undocumentedness, although not in the way undocumentedness is typically understood.

中文翻译：

---

论文的比喻：重新思考非裔美国文学中的（未）记录

我主张对无证身份的重新概念化，即无证身份的经历，从一种简单的现代移民制度的经验转变为一种相互联系的压迫和抵抗系统的结果，这些系统塑造了黑人和愿景为黑人解放。我通过定义和追踪文件的比喻来提出这个论点——使用法律和法外文件来检查和记录非裔美国人和其他非洲人后裔与民族国家的关系——在奴隶叙事和新奴隶叙述。我提供对奴隶叙事的仔细阅读，包括 Sojourner Truth 的 The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) 和 Harriet Jacobs 的女奴生活事件，由她自己撰写，以及新奴隶叙事，