Disinventions by Jos Cortez

Disinventions by Jos Cortez

US immigration policy along the southwestern border is deadly. Since 1994, the US Border Patrol has implemented a federal immigration strategy known as “prevention through deterrence,” which closed off many urban entry points along the US-Mexico border and militarized urban border crossings. This policy forced undocumented migrants to cross through dangerous terrain like the Sonoran Desert, often with tragic results. Immigrant advocates highlight migrant disappearances and deaths to expose the policy’s human toll. In Disinventions, José Manuel Cortez argues this approach is unlikely to bring an end to such oppressive immigration practices.

Disinventions examines the cultural, political, and rhetorical effects of US deterrence practices, exploring how discourse on immigration overlooks subjects who have always been a part of the borderlands but are rarely included in migration narratives. He highlights the failings of decolonial methods and discourse to fully capture and represent marginalized voices, including Black, Central American, and queer subjects. And he develops an ethics of unconditional hospitality embracing undocumented migrants. By drawing on the concept of “atopias” and what he calls “sites of disinvention” to unearth new forms of politics, Cortez suggests we can transcend the limits of decolonization discourse and humanize undocumented immigrants.

This challenging and engaging work should appeal to scholars and students of rhetorical studies, Latinx studies, and American studies.

“Disinventions illuminates a contradiction at the heart of anti- and decolonial rhetorical studies: that the search for an outside to colonial violence reinscribes the binaries it seeks to undermineInstead, Cortez invites rhetoricians to dwell with the aporias and atopias endemic to Western colonial orders and find in them new forms of meaningful, ethical life together. This challenging, evocative book is well worth reading, especially for those invested in a politics—and rhetorical studies—otherwise.”

—Christa J. Olson, author of Constitutive Visions

“Cortez's Disinventions is not only a crucial exploration of the ‘deterrence through prevention’ era of US immigration policy, but it provides a key lens through which we can understand so much about immigration politics in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, Cortez is a master of rhetorical theory, showing his readers that sophisticated theory doesn't have to be sacrificed to produce politically relevant and urgent scholarship. Cortez's work will challenge scholars to think about immigration and rhetoric differently.”

—Karma Chavez, author of Palestine on the Air

José Manuel Cortez is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon.