Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture

The book starts from the model minority myth and asks what role civility plays in it. Phu argues that civility is central to how Asian American citizenship is built, and she traces the idea from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first.

Her method is to read photographs closely. The discussion covers images of Chinese immigrants, Japanese internment camps, still lifes and landscapes from that period, and visual material from the SARS outbreak, including the surgical masks worn in public. Work by photographers such as Arnold Genthe, Carl Iwasaki, Toyo Miyatake and Nick Ut is included.

The book will interest students of Asian American studies, art history and photography, and anyone working on immigration and citizenship. Edition note: published by Temple University Press in 2011, 218 pages, ISBN-13 9781439907214.