Disappearing Rooms

The Hidden Theaters of Immigration Law

Michelle Castañeda author Molly Crabapple illustrator

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:17th Mar '23

Should be back in stock very soon

This hardback is available in another edition too:

Disappearing Rooms cover

In Disappearing Rooms Michelle Castañeda lays bare the criminalization of race enacted every day in US immigration courts and detention centers. She uses a performance studies perspective to show how the theatrical concept of mise-en-scène offers new insights about immigration law and the absurdist dynamics of carceral space. Castañeda draws upon her experiences in immigration trials as an interpreter and courtroom companion to analyze the scenography—lighting, staging, framing, gesture, speech, and choreography—of specific rooms within the immigration enforcement system. Castañeda’s ethnographies of proceedings in a “removal” office in New York City, a detention center courtroom in Texas, and an asylum office in the Northeast reveal the depersonalizing violence enacted in immigration law through its embodied, ritualistic, and affective components. She shows how the creative practices of detained and disappeared people living under acute duress imagine the abolition of detention and borders. Featuring original illustrations by artist-journalist Molly Crabapple, Disappearing Rooms shines a light into otherwise hidden spaces of law within the contemporary deportation regime.

Duke University of Press Scholars of Color First Book Award Recipient

"The book … is a quintessential one in times of increasing hatred towards immigrants. This timely book will help the reader understand the intensity of immigration crises and the need for the growth of a humanitarian world than a world with borders."

-- T.S. Gangothri * Social Identities *
"Michelle Castañeda’s book Disappearing Rooms... is a tour de force that clearly demonstrates how the study of cultural performance provides an indispensable tool for understanding social performances and everyday life. Castañeda diagnoses various institutions at the sites of their theatrical manipulations—the disappearing rooms in her title—to show how immigration law, the prison-industrial complex, and even sometimes immigration activists stage these institutional mise-en-scènes in ways that play into the (in)visibility of carceral power." -- Jennifer Tyburczy * Theatre Journ

ISBN: 9781478016991

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 431g

200 pages