ABSTRACT
As Japanese Americans were immobilized, confined, and resettled during World War II, photographs became a crucial tool both to persuade Americans outside the concentration camps that Japanese Americans could be rewoven into the body politic and to assure Japanese Americans that better lives awaited them on the outside. This chapter focuses on one booklet titled Outcasts! The Story of America’s Treatment of Her Japanese-American Minority (1944) and other wartime public relations pamphlets, which combined photographs and text to make a case for the reabsorption of Japanese Americans into so-called normal American life. It concludes by connecting this historical case study to twenty-first-century exclusion efforts.
