ABSTRACT
This chapter presents yearbooks as complex sites of collective remembrance that simultaneously efface and subtly memorialize instances of discrimination and national shame as they intersect with student experiences at school. It examines high school yearbooks from California’s Santa Clara Valley in the 1940s to examines the traces of Japanese American people and experiences in the years during and immediately surrounding internment to understand the ways students used yearbooks to negotiate their identities in a time of war. The chapter emphasizes the communal work of yearbook production over the more individualized layer of personal engagement evidenced in signatures and inscriptions, though that would be an equally rich and rewarding data set to examines to further understand the role of student-authored texts in representing and remembering major historical events such as World War II.
