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  • Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture by Thy Phu
  • Anna Pegler-Gordon (bio)
Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture. Thy Phu. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. 218 pages. $89.50 cloth; $29.95 paper; $29.95 electronic.

Thy Phu’s Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture neatly captures in its title the key themes that it explores throughout. The word picturing describes its focus on visual—specifically photographic—representations of Asian Americans and Asians by themselves and by others. The term model refers both to the ideal of Asian Americans as a model minority and to the embodiment of this ideal in the physical model before the camera, and citizens addresses the uneven incorporation of Asian Americans and Asians in American understandings of civility and membership.

At the same time that her title tightly defines the book’s focus, Phu takes a much wider angle on these subjects. The broad range of photographs she considers—from Chinese railroad workers, to Japanese picture brides, to still lifes of internment camp vegetables, to the Vietnamese “napalm girl,” to individuals wearing masks during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) crisis—is not entirely encompassed by the idea of Asian American visual culture. Further, Phu addresses citizenship through photographs that circulate in “sites where citizenship is most fiercely contested, ranging from the confined spaces within the nation-state (such as the ethnic enclave of San Francisco’s Chinatown at the turn of the last century and the internment camp during the mid-twentieth century) to those spaces that lie beyond, yet still stretch at, the nation-state’s ‘proper’ boundaries (such as the Pacific theater of war during the postwar and Cold War periods and increasingly securitized airport borders)” (20). In her analysis of both Asian Americans and citizenship, Phu effectively presses at the edges of how these terms have been defined.

In particular, Picturing Model Citizens provides a new prism through which to view established understandings of the model minority myth and Asian American citizenship. In her brilliant introduction, Phu convincingly argues that civility is central to thinking about citizenship, particularly in relation to the emergence of [End Page 241] this myth in the 1960s. Expanding previous analyses of the model minority figure that focus on self-sufficiency, silence, discipline, and obedience, Phu shows how each of these facets is linked with the idea of civility and how civility is linked with citizenship. With its disavowal of violence and emphasis on comportment and community, Phu suggests that civility may be used not only in American projects of colonialism and assimilation but also to challenge American incivility in its denial of legal, social, and biological citizenship to many people. Phu uses these themes to reinterpret A. J. Russell’s famous photograph of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, “East Shakes Hands with West at Laying Last Rail” (1869), as well as photographs of the African American civil rights protests in the 1960s. This study provides new ways of understanding both the emergence of the idea that Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans were model minority subjects and the persistence of this concept.

Although Phu’s introduction articulates an important argument about the ways that civility has been overlooked in Asian American Studies, her argument appears only elliptically in the following chapters. Introducing multiple “ways of looking otherwise” (17) at photography itself as well as the subjects it depicts, each chapter is loosely linked to the others. The first chapter explores intersecting photographic forms from the Asian exclusion era. Phu considers varied family photographs from Chinese applicants and Japanese picture brides that evidenced the family intimacy and identity required by US immigration officials, Arnold Genthe’s street photographs of Chinatown and studio photographs of Chinese women and children, and less familiar family photographs by civil rights advocate Mary Tape. As Phu suggests, these photographs together consider “how civility overlaps with discourses of sentimental comportment” (21). Phu’s complex analysis of the oscillations involved in photographically representing the corporeal citizen-subject is particularly insightful. Chapter Two, “Cultivating Citizenship: Internment Landscapes and Still-Life Photography,” takes a radically new look at Japanese American internment photography through internment...

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