Borders Burned in Ink: Dread Scott’s All African People’s Community Passport (2024)

Reflection on Diaspora, Documentation, and the Redefinition of Citizenship Through Radical Art

In a world increasingly fractured by border walls, immigration quotas, and nationalist rhetoric, few objects carry as much psychological and geopolitical weight as a passport. It is more than an ID—it is a symbol of permission, inclusion, exclusion, and surveillance. A passport is not just a document; it is a contract with the nation-state, a performance of belonging. But what if that belonging were reimagined, detached from colonial cartographies and instead aligned with cultural memory, shared struggle, and pan-African solidarity?

Dread Scott, a trailblazing artist known for his incendiary inquiries into history, race, and power, posed precisely this question with the creation of his All African People’s Community Passport (2024). On the surface, it resembles a traditional travel document: a booklet bound in bold colors, gridded with official-looking pages, embellished with stamps and emblems. But in the hands of Scott—who has spent decades agitating the frameworks of Americanism and state control—this object becomes something far more explosive. It is not about passage across borders. It is about passage beyond them.

Reclaiming the Imagination of Citizenship

To understand the weight of the All African People’s Community Passport, one must understand what Scott seeks to liberate: the imagination of citizenship itself. This is not just a passport for travel; it is a political poem, a speculative artifact forged in the heat of historical trauma and communal dreaming. Issued not by a government but by a people, it proposes a new order of belonging, one rooted in Black radical internationalism.

For Scott, the idea of a unified African passport harks back to the utopian ambitions of thinkers like Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, and Frantz Fanon, who envisioned a Pan-African identity that could transcend the artificial borders imposed by colonialism. This passport builds on that lineage, functioning as a vessel for both memory and resistance. It asks: Who are we when we no longer define ourselves by the coordinates of our captivity?

The cover, emblazoned with rich colors reminiscent of Pan-African flags, carries a seal that reads “All African People’s Community”—a naming that explicitly centers not nations, but peoplehood. In this reframing, citizenship is not a privilege granted by the state, but a birthright claimed by a collective diasporic will.

The Visual Language of Liberation

Scott, whose oeuvre includes burning American flags and restaging slave rebellions, has always been attuned to the symbolic potency of official language and design. The passport’s visual cues—from typefaces to grids, stamps to emblems—mirror those of nation-issued documents, but each design choice subverts the original. The stampings are not tied to border crossings but to events, historical uprisings, collective actions. Instead of “Place of Birth,” you might encounter “Place of Awakening.” Instead of nationality, a line for “Liberatory Orientation.”

The pages are filled with poetry, slogans, declarations, and quotations from revolutionary leaders across the African continent and the diaspora. Passages from Angela Davis, Amílcar Cabral, and Audre Lorde interweave with designs that mimic official paperwork, creating a rhythmic tension between bureaucracy and insurgency. The passport becomes a tactile contradiction—both artifact and disruption, both document and dream.

This contradiction is precisely where the passport finds its power. It holds up a mirror to the absurdities of statehood, questioning the arbitrary mechanisms that allow some bodies to pass while caging others. In its design and intention, it reminds the viewer that identity is political theater, and that sovereignty—true sovereignty—cannot be stamped or revoked.

Community as Issuing Authority

A particularly radical aspect of the All African People’s Community Passport is the act of issuance. Unlike a national passport, distributed by a government to its citizens after bureaucratic clearance, Scott’s passport is issued through community events, art installations, and performances. The ritual of receiving it becomes a form of initiation—not into a country, but into a consciousness.

Recipients are not vetted by economic worth, biometric data, or criminal history, but by participation—by the willingness to imagine and align with a community that defies imperial lines. In this act, Scott reimagines the passport not as a tool of regulation but as a gesture of collective affirmation. One does not apply for entry; one is recognized as already belonging.

This gesture is not without risk. In an era where even art can be criminalized, the idea of creating a “passport” not sanctioned by a recognized nation raises questions about legality, surveillance, and dissent. But that tension is part of the work. Scott is not merely commenting on borders—he is creating an alternative infrastructure, one that exists parallel to the oppressive systems we’ve normalized.

Historic Echoes and Contemporary Urgency

The passport arrives at a moment when migration, both forced and voluntary, defines much of the global narrative. From Haitian asylum seekers whipped at the U.S. border to African refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, the question of Black movement—who gets to move, under what terms, and with what dignity—is both historical and current.

In this context, the All African People’s Community Passport is both an act of mourning and a blueprint for future flight. It mourns the millions stolen, displaced, and denied freedom of movement under colonialism and slavery. But it also imagines a future where such movement is self-determined, where one’s mobility is not tethered to the whims of empire.

The echoes of historic passports issued by revolutionary movements are present here too—think of the Republic of New Afrika or the Black Panther Party’s “Ten-Point Program,” which included demands for land and self-determination. Scott’s passport is heir to this tradition, offering an aesthetic of statehood divorced from the state.

Participation, Performance, and Power

Much of Scott’s art hinges on participatory performance, and the passport is no exception. Installations featuring the piece invite viewers to engage not as spectators but as co-conspirators. In one iteration, people line up not to buy art or watch a film, but to have their passport “stamped” by an artist-clerk who offers affirmations instead of interrogations.

These acts dramatize the power dynamics of immigration offices, airports, and embassies, but invert them. There is no suspicion here, no secondary screening. Only communion. The act of receiving this passport—of holding it, reading its entries, seeing your name beside quotes from ancestors and revolutionaries—becomes a quiet, radiant act of counter-citizenship.

It is in these interactions that the passport transcends its paper form and becomes ritual. It suggests that citizenship can be ceremonial rather than administrative, based on values rather than visas, rooted in shared liberation rather than geographical accident.

The Art of the Stateless

At its most potent, the All African People’s Community Passport argues for an aesthetic of the stateless—not as a mark of precarity, but as a badge of intentional liberation. In rejecting the constraints of nationhood, the passport aligns with a growing chorus of artists, poets, and thinkers who believe that belonging should not be dictated by colonial borders.

This ethos resonates in the work of contemporaries like Simone Leigh, whose sovereign Black women structures at the Venice Biennale reframe presence and monumentality, or John Akomfrah, whose filmic epics render migration as both trauma and myth. Scott stands alongside them, offering a quieter but equally insistent form of revolution—one made of paper, ink, and dreaming.

In doing so, he reminds us that the power of art is not merely to reflect the world but to redesign its terms.

A Future Without Barriers

The All African People’s Community Passport is not utopian in the escapist sense. It doesn’t pretend that borders do not exist. It simply refuses to accept them as final. It offers not an escape, but an alternate route—a new kind of map, one marked not by lines and checkpoints but by relationships, memories, and aspirations.

In Scott’s hands, the passport becomes a weapon against erasure, a balm for statelessness, and a blueprint for Black sovereignty. It is a work that burns gently, persistently—asking not only how we move through the world, but who grants us the right to belong.

If the 20th century was marked by the bureaucratization of identity, the 21st may be defined by its artistic reimagination. With this piece, Dread Scott positions himself not just as an artist, but as a cartographer of freedom, charting paths for all those who have ever been told they don’t belong.