In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Deported
  • Rachel Ida Buff (bio)
Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History. By Daniel Kanstroom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. 352 pages. $47.50 (cloth).
Deporting Our Souls: Values, Morality and Immigration Policy. By Bill Ong Hing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 236 pages. $32.00 (cloth).

In the 2007 film The Visitor, the central character, Walter Vale, is a recently widowed, depressed college professor specializing in international relations. Compelled by his department chair to travel to a conference to present a paper, Vale leaves the suburb where he lives and travels to New York City, where he maintains a one-bedroom apartment. (Though no longer a productive scholar, Vale has apparently managed to hold on to a job that pays him enough to maintain two residences in the metro area.) On opening the door of his little-used apartment, Vale is surprised to find it occupied by a young couple, both of whom are undocumented. Tarek, a Syrian musician, and Zainab, a Senegalese artist, have rented his apartment through the building superintendent, an agent of the underground economy, who has presented it to them as a legal sublet.

Though Tarek and Zainab are the undocumented migrants in this story, Walter is the visitor to their world. He is the one, literally, with the keys: to the apartment, and to full citizenship in the city. But the story unfolds around the paucity of his existence, and his growing connection to Tarek, who begins to teach Walter his art: African drumming. He explains to Walter how he has been influenced by dissident Nigerian pop star Fela Kuti.

We see an uneasy looking Walter attend the academic conference to which he has been dispatched. Other, mostly white, men in suits discuss international trade and security issues. As he leaves, and meets up with Tarek to drum in Washington Square Park, Walter comes to life. But subway police stop Tarek later on that day, as he struggles to get his drum through the turnstiles and go to meet Zainab. Discovering his lack of paperwork, they escort him to a detention center deep in Queens. [End Page 417]

Walter begins to visit Tarek in detention, experiencing the mayhem that passes for justice in such locations. As he becomes more involved with Tarek and Zainab's lives, Walter makes the acquaintance of Tarek's mother, Mouna, who brought Tarek from Syria when he was a small child. As he comes to know the struggles of those who lack his easy access to keys, a veil (Vale?) is lifted from his existence. Now he might have something of substance to say about trade and security.

The Visitor, then, is a not unfamiliar story about the ways in which the lives of white citizens may be deepened and transformed by contact with racialized noncitizens. At the end of the film, Walter does not return to Syria with Mouna to look for Tarek, who has been deported; he does not return to the conference to enlighten those who proceed in their attempts to understand international relations without benefit of a trip to the detention center in Queens. Instead, he sits underground in a subway station, furiously playing Tarek's drum. The visit to the underworld of undocumented life in New York City has changed him: he has become open to the world, and angry at it.

Walter Vale is an outsider who is allowed, through circumstance, to visit a world that surrounds him at the same time it remains primarily invisible to him. Similarly, recent work by two legal scholars speaks to us in American studies about the ways in which lives lived outside the grid of citizenship illuminate urgent issues in historical and contemporary cultural politics. In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man those "invisible and without substance" turn out, "on the lower frequencies," to speak for everyone. Similarly, in these works, the dramas of the detained and the deported speak powerfully to the reframing of political subjectivity.

In Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History, Daniel Kanstroom traces a history of deportation policy that, importantly, begins with a consideration of "various mechanisms of state power over the free movement of individuals—some citizens, some not—that foreshadow...

pdf

Share