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Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability

Most books dealing with immigration in rhetorical studies emphasize relatively contemporary phenomena in the U.S. Such a focus makes sense because rhetoric remains largely a U.S.-centric field, and the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries provide ample material to consider when it comes to immigration rhetoric. Jay Dolmage’s new book, Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability is a notable exception on both fronts. Dolmage’s time period is the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and though a little more than half his book emphasizes the U.S., the other half explores Canadian immigration rhetoric. Disabled Upon Arrival is thus a refreshing read that will be of interest to rhetoric scholars of race, disability, immigration, North American history, and more. Dolmage begins his book with a provocative statement: “In North America, immigration has never been about immigration” (1). Acceptance of this claim requires that the reader shares the “to whom” implied in the claim—politicians, policy makers, immigration and other public health officials—as opposed to other possibilities (in other words, immigrants themselves). Nevertheless, Dolmage convincingly affirms what historians of immigration have long shown: North American immigration policies and practices are deeply imbricated with anxieties over race and the health of the national body. Further, Dolmage reveals that the very ideas of race and disability came to be through the processes would-be immigrants experienced upon their arrival at U.S. ports and borders. Disabled Upon Arrival unfolds in four distinct spaces and processes: island, pier, explosion, and archive. Dolmage engages in practices of reading “sideways,” by centering non-normative experiences and challenging normative expectations for research. This approach means that Dolmage supplies a series of metaphorical snapshots from the different sites under investigation that can be read linearly but certainly don’t need to be. He also goes against the grain by relying extensively on visual rhetorical analysis and discussion of visual media like photography, which was integral to immigration exclusions, without showing a single photograph. Instead, Dolmage refuses to reproduce exoticizing imagery in the book (although a digital archive is available on The Ohio State University Press website), inviting readers to disrupt ocularcentrism and giving them a choice about whether to view quite troubling images. Defining rhetoric as “the strategic study of the circulation of power through communication,” chapter one begins perhaps unsurprisingly with Ellis Island (2). Dolmage claims Ellis Island is a “rhetorical space” power travels through and that shapes power. More specifically, Ellis Island is what Foucault called a “heterotopia of deviation,” dividing that which deviates from the norm. Although the island is often heralded in romantic ways in the U.S. imaginary as a historical space of refuge and an entry point to the American Dream, Dolmage reveals that it was “the key laboratory and operating theater for American eugenics” and its legacies are alive and well (11). Throughout the chapter, Dolmage takes readers through the “assembly line” of immigration Rhetoric Review, Vol. 38, No. 3, 366–374, 2019 Copyright © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0735-0198 print / 1532-7981 online DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2019.1618137