Overview
Amy Sara Carroll (MFA, Creative Writing, Poetry, Cornell University; PhD, Literature, Duke University) is the author of two collections of poetry SECESSION (Hyperbole Books, an imprint of San Diego State University Press, 2012) and FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography (Fordham University Press, 2013), chosen by Claudia Rankine for the 2012 Poets Out Loud Prize. Since 2008, she has been a member of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, coproducing the Transborder Immigrant Tool which has been included in numerous art exhibitions, including the 2010 California Biennial. With EDT 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab and the University of Michigan interdisciplinary workshop the Border Collective, she collaboratively authored [({ })] The Desert Survival Series/La serie de sobrevivencia del desierto (The Office of Net Assessment/ University of Michigan Digital Environments Cluster Publishing Series, 2014), that digitally has been redistributed by CTheory Books (2015), the Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 3 (2016), CONACULTA E-Literatura/Centro de Cultura Digital (2016), and HemiPress (2017). In 2015, Carroll served as the University of Mississippi Summer Poet in Residence. Summer 2010 and every summer thereafter, she has participated in Mexico City’s alternative arts space SOMA. Carroll’s first critical monograph REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press under the auspices of their Mellon Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Cultures Publishing Initiative.
Research Focus
CODESWITCH: The Transborder Immigrant Tool & Global Mexico's Coproduction
In 2017-2018, I will focus on two research projects that build on my prior work as a poet-scholar. In collaboration with Ricardo Dominguez, I will finish drafting “Codeswitch: The Transborder Immigrant Tool,” a hybrid volume that undocuments stages of the Transborder Immigrant Tool’s (TBT) development and deployment. Housed on a GPS-enabled platform, TBT, a coproduction by me, Dominguez, Micha Cárdenas, Elle Mehrmand, Brett Stalbaum and many others including translators and members of humanitarian aid organizations, is a last mile safety device designed to lead the disoriented and thirsty—regardless of their nationality—to water caches and safety sites on the US side of the Mexico-US border. Formally and substantively “Codeswitch” reflects traditions of border cultural production and socially engaged practice that “corrupt” critical and creative writing as well as art, industry, and public policy. In my year at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, I also will work on the second book in a trilogy that I am writing on expressive cultures of greater-becoming-global Mexico. In “Global Mexico’s Coproduction,” I turn to the efforts of three contemporary Mexican filmmakers—Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro González Iñárritu—to redefine “coproduction” literally and metaphorically and to develop the concept of “cognitive kinship diagramming.” Key to my analyses are (1) a millennial iterations of the dialectic of greater and global Mexico and (2) the figures of racialized and sexualized Woman and the mixed race and differentially-abled Child. In this project’s expanding archive (which includes not only Cuarón’s, del Toro’s, and González Iñárritu’s films, but, among other texts, also the artist Francis Alÿs’s repurposing of cuts from Amores Perros, del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s collaborations on the Strain Trilogy, and Cuarón’s Mexicanization of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) a reloaded yet durably troubling mestizaje doubles as the “corruption” of binary logics ranging from nature/nurture to public/private, local/global, and minority/experimental aesthetics.