Chapter Three investigates systematic efforts to dismantle Japanese diasporic communities living on the U.S. West coast alongside the broader emergence of a U.S. wartime security or surveillance state. This chapter explores the expansion of infrastructures to control the limits of human knowledge and information, as it occurred through two interlocked and evolving movements: first, intensified experiments with mass incarceration as dominant mode of organizing public life and culture; and second, the transforming production of racial distinction through conflated languages of geopolitics and nation-state citizenship, culture or ethnicity, and moral affect. In particular, Chapter Three elaborates these movements as they unfolded within a longer history of U.S. warfare in the East Asian Pacific and as they established the physical, administrative, discursive, and subjective forms of censorship conditioning the life of paper for the “Interned.”
