Underbelly | 2026

Experimental Book Design

What is Underbelly?

Underbelly is a magazine examining how legitimacy is performed through legal language—how neutrality, objectivity, and procedural authority are constructed typographically, and how those formal conventions contrast material consequences.

The Exclusion Edition examines Supreme Court cases, executive orders, and official government documents related to state-mandated evacuation, internment, and travel bans. Tracing a lineage from Korematsu v. United States to Trump v. Hawaii, the issue explores how legal interpretation shifts during periods of war, national crisis, and heightened state power—and how the language of law legitimizes exclusion.

The ultimate purpose of the magazine is to encourage a deeper understanding of language and media, and for its readers to apply this analytical framework to the interpretation of current events.

Section 1

Section One focuses on the period of Japanese Incarceration on the West Coast during World War II, when anti-Japanese sentiment was already deeply entrenched in the United States. Pearl Harbor provided government officials with the justification to establish camps across the West Coast, citing claims of imminent danger and threats to national security.

Included are both Executive Order 9066, which authorized the mass incarceration in 1942, and the Supreme Court case Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the constitutionality of the policy. Although the decision
was formally repudiated by the Supreme Court, it remains a warning about the expansive reach of executive power during times of crisis.

Section 2

Section Two highlights the actions taken during the first Trump administration regarding the restriction of immigration from several Muslim-majority countries: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. While this travel ban was similarly justified through claims of pressing dangers to national security, and the inability to discern the “loyal from the disloyal”, the exclusion of Muslim individuals had been a central promise of Trump’s presidential campaign from its inception.

In the shadow of Korematsu v. In the United States, this case reveals important parallels between perceived national crisis and an expansion of executive power.