Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture by Thy Phu (review)

Thy Phu’s recent monograph Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture productively moves beyond a common impasse in discussions of citizenship in Asian American cultural politics: the tension between the twin stereotypes of the “model minority” and the “perpetual foreigner.” Instead, Phu uses an engaging and historically expansive archive of photographs of Asians and Asian Americans in order to offer an alternative understanding of how people of Asian descent claim belonging in the U.S. nation-state. For Phu, the “profoundly embodied process” of claiming citizenship operates through strategic performances of “civilities” in visual culture (15). Tracing the construction of “civil” behavior in images from the late nineteenth-century photography of San Francisco’s Chinatown to Associated Press images of Asian citizens wearing surgical masks in 2003, Phu locates four major forms of civility: “sentimental comportment” in honorific portraiture, “cultivation of landscape” in World War II internment camps, “manner of apology” in the years directly following the Vietnam War, and the “etiquette of hygiene” during the panic over “diseased” Asian bodies during the SARS epidemic (21). In her close readings, Phu locates the productive tensions between assimilationist and resistant modes of politicized visualities, building on Susan Herbst’s understanding of civility as “a technology” (11). In doing so, Phu understands the individual deployment of civility not purely as a capitulation to white supremacy and U.S. hegemony but as a redefinition of the terms by which citizenship is granted. By participating in the “alternative civil space” of the photograph, Asian Americans imagine a citizenship that may be earned, rather than merely granted by birthright or by a state legal apparatus (17).

What separates Picturing Model Citizens most distinctly from other recent scholarship on citizenship claims in Asian American photography (in particular Anna Pegler-Gordon’s excellent 2006 book In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy) is her deep engagement with the field of visual culture. Phu’s readings converse not just with cultural historians but also with a range of scholars of philosophy and aesthetics, including filmmaker-turned-critic Ariella Azoulay and photographer-theorist Allan Sekula. Likewise, Asian American imaging practices are compared with canonical (white) works in twentieth-century American photographic history: in chapter 2, for example, Henry Ushioka’s still lifes of the food grown by interned Japanese and Japanese American people during World War II are read against pieces by Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. Attuned to the complexities of photography’s claim to the mimetic, Phu undertakes close readings of these images that understand them not as simply “evidence” of a particular historical period, but as acts of mediated representation. This is particularly evident in chapter 3, in which Phu examines photographs of an “unnamed Hiroshima Maiden” whose facial reconstruction procedures served as illustrative examples in the American textbook Principles of Plastic Surgery. Comparing two of these images, Phu notes the ironic similarity to the “head shot” genre of portraiture to establish the gendered and racialized forms of medicalization at work in the images. In one photograph, in which the “reconstructed” patient “poses as if for a portrait,” Phu identifies the “subtle, though still perceptible, changes in composition” that reveal the subject to “meet the lens’s gaze directly, in seeming recognition of the prospective surgeons who are her viewers” (102). While the stakes are high in these ascriptions of emotion to unknown people in photographs, the attention to framing and composition in these readings eschews the problematic impulse to merely speak for others.

Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture is a useful text for people studying Asian American history and culture and the history of U.S. photography, as well as for those interested in the philosophical and political stakes of theories of representation. Thy Phu’s use of “civility” as an organizing term sometimes feels stretched to encompass her entire archive: the link between civility and hygiene...