Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theaters of Immigration Law by Michelle Castañeda (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theaters of Immigration Law by Michelle Castañeda
• Gary M. English (bio)

Michelle Castañeda, Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theaters of Immigration Law (Duke University Press 2023), ISBN 9781470819633 (Paperback), 186 pages.

Michelle Castañeda, Assistant Professor in Performance Studies at NYU, has written an excellent and deeply thought-provoking book on the fundamental contradictions of immigration and asylum law, as brutally revealed through the lens of performance theory:

Legal processes are rich in scenographic details because institutions tend to dramatize their own authority . . . In other words, as legal officials do something—in this case, ordering Ernesto be deported—they may simultaneously make a show of what they are doing and create a little scene that elaborates deportation’s ugly logic . . . Performance theorists argue that when we pay attention to the law’s mise-en-scène, it is no longer possible to perceive the law as a coherent and self-assured entity. Instead, we see the law’s “fragile and volatile nature,” the ongoing attempt by legal officials to manage contradictions.¹

The image evoked in this quote refers to a moment when Ernesto stood before an Immigration Court Judge, with his hands cuffed behind his back to a chair. When ordered to raise his right hand to swear his oath, Ernesto was forced into a deformed position with his right hand pointing up from the level of his hip and his torso twisted to his right very nearly at a right angle. No one bothered to unlock his handcuffs. The grotesque physical position forced upon Ernesto offers an example of how “staging” within the immigration legal system places individuals into impossible positions, certainly in this case physically, but also the image evokes the emotional and mental gymnastics and traumas (im)migrants face when confronting gratuitous cruelty, and various types of performative and contradictory treatment at the hands of the immigration legal system.

In many ways I have been waiting for this book as for some time I have argued, [End Page 164] including within the pages of the Human Rights Quarterly, that performance theory, dramatic structure, and the dialectics associated with political drama offer deep insights into the contradictions within international and human rights law or, in this case in particular, immigration and asylum law. Castañeda, who received a Ph.D. from Brown University, writes with clarity, daring originality, and heart, from the point of view of “a participant in the accompaniment program, where our job is to remain by the side of people attending ICE check-ins and sit with them for a seemingly eternal duration until we find out whether they will be ‘removed.’”² As both an activist and scholar, the author provides an up-close, on-the-ground, and authentic portrayal of the immigration and asylum legal and deportation system with respect to specific cases, and an historical analysis of the entire system from a higher altitude. The result provides a disciplined, well-researched, and exceptionally well-theorized presentation with remarkable and revealing details, re-creating the atmosphere that describes a cruel, sometimes well-intended, often violent, de-humanizing, occasionally humane process nearly always on the edge of absurdity. The author employs multiple performance conventions, including gestus, taken from Bertolt Brecht, where a small gesture or body position evokes deep and nuanced meanings, or, “ . . . an entire historical moment or social issue”;³ audience generated alternatives to complex problems as with Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed techniques as a means of, “rehearsing” alternative endings, or processes related to unresolved social issues;⁴ and revitalized Aristotelian concepts of dramatic form, such as plausibility and believability. As with Aristotle, Castañeda compares the history of theatre to the history of law, and Castañeda argues persuasively that the two connect through the necessity of actors (be them on stage or in political situations) to tell a believable, or plausible, story without appearing to tell a story. In other words, we consider various narratives as truthful due to our desire to accept those narratives according to our preferences for melodramatic dramaturgy, that is, those that appear both plausible, authentic, and most often constructed according to a good-bad binary...