During World War Two, a series of legal performatives labored to legitimize the exclusion and incarceration of approximately120,000 Japanese Americans. A corresponding public relations campaign relied upon visual imagery in film, photography, and propaganda to define the Japanese American body as the limit point to national belonging and a threat to national security. Despite bans on photography by internees, a significant number of the incarcerated smuggled equipment into the camps, documenting the range of the life worlds exceeding the boundaries of the bared wire. In this talk, Professor Chambers-Letson argues that the photographic scrapbook of internee Moriyuki Shimada is a type of performing object, affirming affective particularity against the visual, social, and juridical exclusion of Japanese America; modeling alternative modes of social and civic belonging; and documenting the technologies of subjection that occurred within Americas concentration camps.
