Syntactical Play: Toward a Counter-Affective Rhetorics of the Anti-Mexican Document

Cody's poetry collection Borderland Apocrypha (2020) counters and indicts the syntactical implications of various anti-immigrant documents. Syntax here refers to playful excisions, erasures, overlays, empty spaces, shadows, diagrams, pronominal forms, verb tenses, and archival fragments and incompletions. I bring together critical affect studies and decolonial studies to propose a theoretical framework of syntactical play that I term "counter-affective rhetorics." This framework demonstrates an option that minoritized subjects employ to disrupt and make visible the harmful historical and contemporary discursive and non-discursive practices of U.S. documents. I argue that through such a framework syntax is also an emotional manifestation and practice that places language and emotion "beside" each other to act as co-conspirators for sense-making. Using this framework, I rhetorically analyze the playful syntactical strategies in Borderland Apocrypha to demonstrate how the poet Anthony Cody disrupts the production, encounter, and circulation of The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Proposition 63, Proposition 187, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation manuals. In so doing, I build on the work of decolonial rhetoric and writing studies scholars who have argued for a disruption of discursive systems in service of decolonial futures but have not attended fully to how the non-discursive works in tandem with the discursive to compose what they call "delinked" decolonial futures.