Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture

by Thy Phu

Overview

At the heart of the model minority myth—often associated with Asian Americans—is the concept of civility. In this groundbreaking book, Picturing Model Citizens, Thy Phu exposes the complex links between civility and citizenship, and argues that civility plays a crucial role in constructing Asian American citizenship.

Featuring works by Arnold Genthe, Carl Iwasaki, Toyo Miyatake, Nick Ut, and others, Picturing Model Citizens traces the trope of civility from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Through an examination of photographs of Chinese immigrants, Japanese internment camps, the Hiroshima Maidens project, napalm victims, and the SARS epidemic, Phu explores civility's unexpected appearance in images that draw on discourses of intimacy, cultivation, apology, and hygiene. She reveals how Asian American visual culture illustrates not only cultural ideas of civility, but also contests the contradictions of state-defined citizenship.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439907221
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	05/13/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	218
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Thy Phu is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Western Ontario. She is editor of the Americas region for the journal Photography and Culture, and co-editor (with Elspeth Brown) of a collection of essays entitled Feeling Photography.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Prologue Introduction: Clasped Hands and Clenched Fists 1. Spectacles of Intimacy and the Aesthetics of Domestication 2. Cultivating Citizenship: Internment Landscapes and Still-Life Photography 3. A Manner of Apology: Transpacifism and the Scars of Reparation 4. Racial Hygiene: SARS, Surgical Masks, and the Civility of Surveillance Postscript: The Inhospitable Politics of Repatriation Notes Bibliography Index