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Gad Guterman. Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. viii + 236 pp.
Gad Guterman insightfully tackles the contentious topic of illegal immigration by exploring how onstage representations of undocumentedness bring visibility to a governmentally relegated space of invisibility. Guterman introduces the term "undocumentedness" as the "circumstances under which people must live," and ends up critiquing the systemic forces that create those circumstances just as much as he explores the lived experience of undocumentedness in the U.S. (2). He begins by proposing that legal identities be given as much attention as gender, ethnic, or national identities to cut across limiting divisions between those standard categorizations (14). He builds upon the concept "legal consciousness," originating from the field of legal anthropology, to understand how immigration law alters the construction of one's identity and shapes how people navigate their lives, concluding that "issues of law and identity are inseparable from issues of performance" (17). This triad of law, identity, and performance is explored through the analyses of plays written after 1970 containing themes of undocumentedness, interwoven with historical contextualizations of immigration laws from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 through the formation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. The book is organized with headings from various areas of the Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) to create "a...