Japanese American Incarceration: Past & Present Encounters with the Racial State

How do we situate the history of World War II Japanese American incarceration not as an exceptional moment of wartime hysteria, but as one example of an American tradition of racialized exclusion and incarceration in the service of white supremacy? How does public memory surrounding Japanese American incarceration shape our understanding of the relationships between immigration, race, exclusion, and incarceration today? Drawing from interdisciplinary sources from photographs to literature, academic texts, films, exhibits, and poetry, this course traces the history of incarceration in the United States as a mechanism of racialized social control by focusing on Japanese American history.