Japanese American incarceration during World War II is one of—if not the—most well-known historical moments of Asian American history disseminated in wider US public discourse. The topic has made its way into high school textbooks, boasts a robust catalog of memoirs penned by prior incarcerees, and remains on display as a permanent exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM). Although the remembrance of Japanese American incarceration is important (as numerous Asian American scholars have argued for over a decade), widely circulated public interpretation of incarceration is not without its faults. In Carceral Entanglements: Gendered Public Memories of Japanese American World War II Incarceration, Wendi Yamashita examines how these public memories came into their current iteration and the consequences of these ideas.

As a historian of Japanese and Japanese American history, I have often pondered the questions that Yamashita explores in Carceral Entanglements. She observes that narratives...

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