Lane Ryo Hirabayashi

In this collection of seventeen essays, anthropologists, art historians, museum curators, writers, designers, and historians provide case studies exploring collaboration with community-oriented partners in order to document, interpret, and present their histories and experiences and provide a new understanding of what museums can and should be in the United States.

Reversing the Lens brings together noted scholars in history, anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies and film studies to promote film as a powerful classroom tool that can be used to foster cross-cultural communication with respect to race and ethnicity. Through such films as Skin Deep, Slaying the Dragon, and Mississippi Masala, contributors demonstrate why and how visual media help delineate various forms of "critical visual thinking" and examine how racialization is either sedimented or contested in the popular imagination. Not limited to classroom use, Reversing the Lens is relevant to anyone who is curious about how video and film can be utilized to expose race as a social construction in dialogue with other potential forms of difference and subject to political contestation.

Featuring selected inmates and camp groups, Arthur Hansen reveals why, when, where, and how some of the 120,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans spearheaded resistance movements in the ten War Relocation Authority–administered compounds in the United States during World War II.