Reviewed by:

• Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theaters of Immigration Law by Michelle Castañeda
• Jennifer Tyburczy

Michelle Castañeda’s book Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theaters of Immigration Law 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 [End Page 590] (in)visibility of carceral power. At its core, the book is a decolonial love letter toward the abolition of what Castañeda, borrowing from Michel Foucault, refers to throughout the book as the prison heterotopia. Viewed through the scenography of the various rooms (e.g., the removal room and immigration courtrooms inside detention centers) that make up the primary sites of Castañeda’s analysis, this prison heterotopia operates through a “strategic investment in incoherence” that incites a “delirious impression” and “the feeling of living among absurdly derealized forms [that come] to define the experience of imprisonment itself” (58–59). This absurdity, Castañeda deftly explains, is calculated, stylized, and carefully choreographed in high stakes environments where life-altering decisions are made. Who can enter and who cannot enter the US, yes, but also the rooms she details, hangs in the balance.

In addition to a writing style that is clear, engaging, accessible, and theoretically rigorous, Castañeda’s words perform alongside the illustrations of artist, activist, and journalist Molly Crabapple, who depicts many of the scenes that Castañeda vividly describes and unpacks in each of her three chapters. These illustrations, based on Crabapple’s interpretation of what she was told by volunteers such as Castañeda who accompany (im)migrants, make visible what Castañeda evocatively elicits in her prose: the absurdity of immigration’s “hidden theaters” and the ways in which those detained and contained by these rooms navigate, view, and perceive the colonial spaces of immigration law. The result is a uniquely innovative and interdisciplinary performance studies text that shows the intricate scenographic details of rarely seen environments and does the urgent work of accompanying people through the marked and unmarked doors of courtrooms and detention centers. Disappearing Rooms will be an indispensable text across several fields including theater and performance studies, Latina/x/o Studies, US-Mexico borderland studies, visual culture studies, and migration and immigration studies, among others. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students alike, Disappearing Rooms is a model of academic writing at its best and a pioneer in writer-artist collaboration.

Castañeda’s cogent use of mise-en-scène as method becomes possible through her embodied practices of accompanying racialized and mostly Central American (im)migrants through the obscured spaces of detention centers and courtrooms. Her exquisitely penned meditations on what it means to practice accompaniment reveal the intentionally designed obstacles to bearing witness within a carceral theater predicated on “making the event of disappearance into a nonevent” (33). While taking care not to elide important differences between them, Castañeda delineates certain strategies of disappearance that connect US-Mexico border regimes and US-sponsored military dictatorships throughout the Americas. Namely, Castañeda analyzes a central paradox to the staging of disappearance as a “condition planned, executed, and arranged to appear as though nothing had been planned, executed, or arranged” (27). In the case of the immigration rooms that are the focus of her study, she argues that these disappearance strategies become evident through the mise-en-scéne that is at once dependent on the spectacle of inventing and removing the “criminal immigrant” while “erecting a shadow zone of law insulated from accountability and devoid of normativity” (39). The incoherence of immigration law’s mise-en-scène hinges upon this dynamic of simultaneously displaying and hiding. Alongside Crabapple’s illustrations, Castañeda’s accompaniment practices gift the reader with a multi-sensual “being with” that rearranges...

审阅者：

• 消失的房间：移民法的隐藏剧场米歇尔·卡斯塔涅达
• 詹妮弗·蒂布西

米歇尔·卡斯塔涅达（Michelle Castañeda）的著作《消失的房间：移民法的隐藏剧院》是一部杰作，它清楚地展示了文化表演研究如何为理解社会表演和日常生活提供了不可或缺的工具。卡斯塔涅达在各种机构的戏剧操纵现场（她的标题中消失的房间）对各种机构进行了诊断，以展示移民法、监狱工业综合体，甚至有时移民活动家如何以融入现实的方式上演这些机构的布景。[第 590 页完]监狱权力的可见性。从本质上讲，这本书是一封去殖民主义的情书，旨在废除卡斯塔涅达借用米歇尔·福柯的话，在整本书中将其称为监狱异托邦。通过构成卡斯塔涅达分析的主要地点的各个房间（例如，拘留中心内的驱逐室和移民法庭）的场景来看，这个监狱异托邦通过“不连贯的战略投资”运作，煽动一种“疯狂的印象”以及“生活在荒谬的脱离现实的形式中的感觉，[这些形式]定义了监禁本身的经历”（58-59）。卡斯塔涅达巧妙地解释说，这种荒谬是在做出改变生活的决定的高风险环境中经过计算、程式化和精心编排的。是的，谁可以进入、谁不能进入美国，但她详细介绍的房间也悬而未决。

除了清晰、引人入胜、通俗易懂且理论严谨的写作风格外，卡斯塔涅达的文字与艺术家、活动家和记者莫莉·克拉伯尔的插图相得益彰，莫莉·克拉伯尔描绘了卡斯塔涅达在她的每一本书中生动地描述和解​​构的许多场景。三章。这些插图基于克拉普尔对陪同（移民）移民的卡斯塔涅达等志愿者讲述的内容的解释，使卡斯塔涅达在她的散文中引人深思的内容变得可见：移民“隐藏剧院”的荒谬性，以及那些被拘留和拘留的人的方式。这些房间包含导航、查看和感知移民法的殖民空间。其结果是一部独特的创新和跨学科的表演研究文本，展示了罕见环境中错综复杂的场景细节，并完成了陪伴人们穿过法庭和拘留中心有标记和无标记门的紧急工作。《消失的房间》将成为戏剧和表演研究、拉丁裔/异族研究、美墨边境研究、视觉文化研究、移民和移民研究等多个领域不可或缺的教科书。《消失的房间》适合本科生和研究生，是学术写作的典范，也是作家与艺术家合作的先驱。

卡斯塔涅达通过陪伴种族化的、主要是中美洲（移民）移民穿过拘留中心和法庭的隐蔽空间的具体实践，使场景调度成为一种令人信服的方法。她对练习伴奏意味着什么进行了精妙的思考，揭示了在监狱剧院中故意设计的见证障碍，其基础是“让失踪事件变成无稽之谈”(33)。卡斯塔涅达在注意不要忽略它们之间的重要差异的同时，描述了将美墨边境政权和美国支持的整个美洲军事独裁政权联系起来的某些消失策略。也就是说，卡斯塔涅达分析了将失踪上演的一个核心悖论，即“计划、执行和安排的条件，看起来好像什么都没有计划、执行或安排”（27）。就她研究的重点移民室而言，她认为这些消失策略通过场景布景变得显而易见，而场景布景立即依赖于发明和消除“犯罪移民”同时“建立起来”的奇观。一个与问责制隔绝且缺乏规范性的法律阴影区”（39）。移民法场面调度的不连贯性取决于这种同时展示和隐藏的动态。除了 Crabapple 的插图之外，Castañeda 的伴奏练习还为读者提供了一种多感官的“在一起”，重新安排......