Picturing Model Citizens

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.

"This book concerns the appearance of Asians in nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographs as related, first, to civility and, secondarily, to issues of citizenship...Thy Phu is deeply interested in probing the symbolic meanings behind the photographs as they relate to Asians as the 'model minority.'... Phu makes some interesting points."--Pacific Historical Review , August 2013 "Picturing Model Citizens presents a compelling, original, and timely contribution to the nascent field of Asian American visual studies, productively drawing together a set of photographic archives and contexts that have, for too long, been arbitrarily imagined as discrete and disconnected... Phu's Picturing Model Citizens is itself a model of engaged and innovative scholarship, charting new directions for Asian American studies, visual studies, citizenship studies, and the emergent combinations therein."--caa.reviews, June 26, 2013

• Acknowledgments; Preface; Introduction: Clasped Hands and Clenched Fists; Spectacles of Intimacy and the Aesthetics of Domestication; Cultivating Citizenship: Internment Landscapes and Still Lifes; A Manner of Apology: Transpacifism and the Scars of Reparation; Racial Hygiene: SARS, Surgical Masks, and the Civility of Surveillance; Postscript: The Inhospitable Politics of Repatriation; Bibliography.