100 books like Dear America

Torpey’s book, first published in 2000, is now a classic. With it, he helped open up a whole field of inquiry into the history of official documents and identification techniques that both constrain—and make conceivable—modern society. Here, think of street addresses, fingerprints, birth certificates, credit records, driver’s licenses, tax forms, and visas. For Torpey, the passport, “that little paper booklet with the power to open international doors,” is a window into modern nation states’ interest in regulating movement. For his readers, it is a bracing reminder of how recent those controls are and how habituated we denizens of the 21st century have become to showing our papers.

What’s not to like about a book on “the psychic life of paperwork”? The Demon of Writing is a meditation on the rise of a modern “culture of paperwork” from the French Revolution onward. It brings to the foreground things we don’t tend to think about until we are caught up in some sort of bureaucratic morass: memos, forms, reports, and files. And it probes the ideologies buried under all that official paper. Linking the rise of paperwork to the rise of political representation, Kafka is interested in the way record-keeping promises uniformity or predictability but just as often produces an error, friction, and resistance. This is a witty and illuminating account of the rule of documents, packed with stories drawn from the bureaucratic archive.

She really gets at the heart of how Brown and Black bodies are seen, and what is fascinating to me is the approach through current “technical art” and a good discussion of architecture. I had a class focus on her discussion—lengthy—about surveillance and race. It’s extremely poignant, and something whites especially just don’t think about. I will never again go through an airport without thinking about her book. 

Although it reads like a spy novel, this is the real-life account of a noted English journalist’s encounter with his own Stasi surveillance file. The file in question was compiled in the early 1980s by the East German secret police on Garton Ash (code name “Romeo”), then a young man living in Berlin and writing about Central European communism. Garton Ash opened his file fifteen years later, after the former German Democratic Republic made Stasi records accessible. Tracking those who tailed him, the book explores the uneasy sensation of reading one’s past life through the photographs, informant reports, surveillance notes, and speculations of those tasked with observing a target of suspicion. It’s a compelling and often chilling chronicle of the costs both of watching and being watched.

Cummings and his friend William Slater Brown were imprisoned in a detention center for foreign ‘undesirables,’ and to this day we are guilty of locking people up because they are stateless or nationals of another country. Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, translated by Omid Tofighian, recounts his imprisonment along with fellow refugees on Manus Island. It is a visceral and vivid account, and it speaks in an unrefusable voice. I think it is an act of true human generosity that someone who has suffered so much at our collective hands would still choose to reach out and tell his own story; simply choosing to speak is an act of great hope and belief.

While most academic work on detention focuses on immigration enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico border or in the U.S. interior, this book traces the origin of detention to U.S. efforts to deter the Cuban and Haitian migration that occurred as part of U.S. Cold War dealings.

With fascinating, painstaking historical research, Loyd and Mountz argue that the legal and infrastructural foundations of the contemporary detention system were established through the U.S. response to Caribbean migration in the 1990s and the goal of preventing migrants from claiming the international right to asylum.

The book also shows how racism—especially anti-Black racism—has been at the core of immigration detention since the beginning, as have abhorrent, shocking conditions of detention facilities.

This is easily the best account of the complex, racialized history of U.S. immigration law, politics, and policy. One of the arguments in it that impressed me most is that the category “illegal aliens”—the “impossible subjects” of the title—barely existed in the pre-World War I years, when almost no European immigrants were turned away from the U.S. (Asians were another story). Ngai also brilliantly analyzes two landmark laws: the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which dramatically restricted immigration through nationality-based quotas limiting arrivals from Eastern and Southern Europe; and the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which eliminated the quotas and opened the door to a massive new immigrant influx. This is a densely written book, not an easy read, but no other text has taught me more about this topic.

This story spoke to my frustration with harsh immigration policies separating families. Talia is American-born, but her Columbian parents, Elena and Mauro, are undocumented. Her sister is also undocumented, while her brother is an American citizen who hopes to secure his family’s future—somehow—when he's 21. Mauro’s life was destroyed when he was deported away from Elena and the children. Talia, who lives with her grandmother in Colombia, ends up in a correctional facility. She escapes, hoping to return to the US. This family belongs together, but for now their dream is kept alive by Andean myths of condors flying free. A moving story of love and danger about parents and children struggling to build normal lives that are always just out of reach.

Enrique’s Journey follows a 17-year-old boy from Honduras who migrates to the US in search of his mother who has been gone for 11 years. Although he is in touch with her via sporadic phone calls, his yearning to be with her is so deep that he undertakes a journey that is at once desperate, full of love and hope, and exceedingly dangerous.

The author, an award-winning journalist, documents Enrique’s journey to survive his trek northward that he undertakes with absolutely no money from a small Honduran village through Mexico atop freight trains, and his efforts to survive not only the dangerous train ride but the violence of those who prey on young migrants.

Though he does find his mother in North Carolina, his reunion is not easy as his resentment at being left behind plagues their relationship.

Nadine Gordimer’s book sucked me into its post-apartheid South Africa setting.

I greatly admired how Gordimer bravely tackles the thorny matter of interracial relationships, chronicling an improbable love affair between an illegal immigrant in South Africa and a privileged white South African. Gordimer navigates the complexity of the relationship with insight and empathy, sidestepping the expediency of simplicity to deal frontally with matters of love, race, and class struggle.