Picturing Model Citizens

Civility in Asian American Visual Culture

Thy Phu

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781439907221
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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. 

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