Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture 143990720X, 9781439907207

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Picturing Model Citizens

Picturing Model Citizens Civility in Asian American Visual Culture

Thy Phu

T e mp l e U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s

Philadelphia

Temple University Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress

Copyright © 2012 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2012 The publisher and author have made all reasonable attempts to locate the owners of the illustrations published in this book. If you believe you may be one of them, please contact Temple University Press, and the publisher will include appropriate acknowledgment in subsequent editions. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Phu, Thy, 1975–   Picturing model citizens : civility in Asian American visual culture / Thy Phu.    p. cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-1-4399-0720-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4399-0721-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4399-0722-1 (e-book)   1.  Asian Americans in popular culture.  2. Images, Photographic—Social aspects—United States.  3.  Photography—Social aspects—United States.  4.  United States—Emigration and immigration— Social aspects.  5.  Courtesy—United States.  6.  Citizenship—United States. I.  Title.  E184.A75P53 2012   305.895′073—dc23 2011043059 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 Printed in the United States of America 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Prologue

1

Introduction: Clasped Hands and Clenched Fists

6

1 Spectacles of Intimacy and the Aesthetics of Domestication

26

2 Cultivating Citizenship: Internment Landscapes and Still-Life Photography

54

3  A Manner of Apology: Transpacifism and the Scars of Reparation

84

4 Racial Hygiene: SARS, Surgical Masks, and the Civility of Surveillance

121

Postscript: The Inhospitable Politics of Repatriation

147

Notes

159

Bibliography

189

Index

205

Acknowledgments

I

t would be unseemly, in a book about civility, not to acknowledge the tremendous support that has helped sustain this research through the years. Many of my archival expeditions were funded through the assistance provided by the English Department at the University of Western Ontario and through the auspices of a grant provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful to Emily Barsky, Sylvia Chong, Nancy K. Miller, and Tom Miller for sharing their unpublished work with me. I am especially thankful to Phan Thi Kim Phuc for agreeing to speak with me on the question of forgiveness; to Bill Herod for letting me know more about the important work that remains to be done regarding Cambodian returnees; to John Couch at Ralph Edwards Productions for sending me a rare copy of “This Is Your Life—Kiyoshi Tanimoto”; to Sopheap Theam and Light of Cambodian Children, Inc., for their work in collecting the important archive of refugee and transit photographs; to Alan Miyatake for welcoming me into his family’s studio and for the gift of being able to look through the Miyatake Collection; to the helpful librarians at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and in San Francisco, California, for guiding me through a treasure trove of documents; and to my assistants, the tireless Sunny Xiang, the energetic Thomas Barnes, and the diligent Y-Dang Troeung, who made sure that I minded my manners accurately. My thanks go also to my editor, Janet Francendese, for believing in this book and to my anonymous readers, whose insightful suggestions helped to make it better. I am fortunate to work with a remarkable group of colleagues, members of the Toronto Photography Seminar, whose appetite for good scholarship is

viii  Acknowledgments

only matched by their hunger for even better food. My dear friends Lily Cho, Donald Goellnicht, and Pauline Wakeham listened attentively to me, even when I was not quite sure what I wanted to say, and when I did know, their incisive comments enabled my words to take more elegant form. You are a constant source of inspiration. I am grateful to my mentor, Elizabeth Abel, whose patience, compassion, and generosity is my model for ideal academic citizenship. This book is dedicated with love to my parents, to Michael, and to the memory of Tecla Wong.

Prologue

S

hould civility govern public discourse and the conduct of citizens? This seemingly simple question sparked fierce debate in response to incendiary statements about Jared Loughner’s infamous shooting spree in a suburb near Tucson, Arizona, on January 8, 2011. Nineteen people were shot, and six of them died, including Chief Judge John Roll and nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green. Among those injured was Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Although the attack, the latest in a decades-long rash of mass shootings, reignited familiar discussions about gun control, what was unusual about it was civility’s sudden and surprising centrality. After all, the lone, crazed shooter is usually singled out as the cause. Civility has little, if anything, to do with the narrative shaped by the moral discourse on mass shootings. However, critics pointed out that nearly a year earlier, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s “Crosshairs” map on Facebook had targeted Democrats such as Giffords and could therefore be construed as an incitement to violence.1 Although Loughner appeared to be a disturbed man, his hostility toward Giffords’s views was well known. While the debate on civility was not explicitly framed within the terms of immigration, a few commentators noted that Giffords drew attention for her opposition to Arizona’s notoriously punitive immigration law.2 The standard madman theory of mass shootings, which was confirmed several months later in May 2011, when Loughner was declared unfit to stand trial, was nevertheless complicated by this possible political motivation. In a confusing video statement, Palin blasted back, accusing her accusers, in turn, of “blood libel”—uncivil speech—and unapologetically defending the incivility of her own violent rhetoric by linking

2  Prologue

it to a patriotic tradition.3 “There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal,” she acknowledged, “and they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated? Back in those ‘calm days’ when political figures literally settled their differences with duelling pistols? In an ideal world all discourse would be civil and all disagreements cordial. But our Founding Fathers knew they weren’t designing a system for perfect men and women.”4 On the day that this video statement was broadcast, President Barack Obama delivered an eloquent speech on civility at the University of Arizona that also addressed the increasingly divisive tenor of public speech, exhorting that “at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized—at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do—it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”5 Unlike Palin, for whom civility is an ideal whose impossibility is corrected through the system of government, Obama insists that nevertheless this ideal should be the foundation of American life and, by implication, a part of this system: “The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better in our private lives—to be better friends and neighbors, co-workers and parents. And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let’s remember that it is because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.”6 For Obama, civility is a primary condition of citizenship. In calling for a return to civil discourse, Obama was also in a sense calling for a model citizenship. This book explores how civility helps to construct and, at times, to dismantle this ideal. Although Loughner’s motivations were unclear, what is certain is that civility suddenly mattered. Shortly after Obama’s landmark speech, the University of Arizona announced that it would establish a National Institute for Civil Discourse, with former presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush serving as honorary chairmen of the foundation. The conduct of public and private life has become politically relevant in an unexpected way. Yet discussions about this conduct remain simplistically polarized, swinging between proper and improper—good and bad—comportment. Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this binary was recently provided in one of the most dramatic events in the war on terror: the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Two striking pictures stand out. The first, the face of the dead leader of al Qaeda, is one that we will likely never see.7 Obama has refused to release this photograph, explaining that the exposure of such

Prologue  3

graphic violence would foment further violence and thus jeopardize national security. Indeed, his decision to suppress a photograph depicting death affirms the policy of his predecessor’s administration. George W. Bush also censored pictures of dead U.S. soldiers, Guantánamo Bay detainees, and (unsuccessfully) the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But for those who doubted the confusing stories spinning in the mass media, the rumors that churned on the Internet, and the conflicting reports emerging from the White House, the photograph of bin Laden’s corpse would provide, they believed, irrefutable evidence, a macabre token, of SEAL Team 6’s successful mission. So powerful was the desire to lay eyes on this memento mori that a fake photograph featuring a gruesome head—a composite of bin Laden’s face and a different man’s bloodied head that had been widely circulating for two years—was featured on the front pages of newspaper websites based in Pakistan and the United Kingdom. I call this spectacle spectral for two reasons: not only does it haunt the triumphal narrative that ensued, but it is also conjured through digital manipulation, which gives wild expression to morbid fantasies. This first image of death brings into sharp relief the image that was released instead. The second, now iconic, photograph is the so-called Situation Room photograph.8 Taken by White House photographer Pete Souza, it features political and military leaders, including President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, intensely focusing on a live video feed of the Navy SEAL raid on bin Laden’s Pakistani compound. Released at a time when the decision to censor another photograph was made and immediately after other images (of spontaneous street parties that broke out even before the news was officially confirmed) were in wide circulation, the Situation Room photo provides a visual model for proper accounting of both the decision to kill and the response to the decision. Although the Situation Room photo is to my knowledge rarely, if ever, discussed in terms of civility—commentary has instead focused on the banality of the Situation Room as compared to its glossy sophistication in popular TV shows such as 24, the seeming powerlessness of the powerful people who inhabit this space as mere spectators of rather than actors in history as it unfolds, and the uncertain truths that it reveals9 —the image nevertheless illustrates appropriate deportment, conduct fitting for the model citizen. Even Clinton’s expression in the Situation Room photo, most notably the fact that she covers her mouth with her hand, tells a story. Commenting for the Washington Post, dance critic Sarah Kaufman remarks that it is “Hillary Clinton who seizes the audience. With the gesture of the hand to the mouth, as if masking a gasp, she is expressive, emotional and human, a Cassandra who stands out amid the lockjawed, impassive ensemble.”10 This gesture of recoil registers simultaneously the horror of death while acknowledging its

4  Prologue

necessity.11 When contrasted with the glee that showed that bin Laden’s death was not, in Judith Butler’s terms, grievable,12 Clinton’s recoil returns to these events a proper accounting of death; juxtaposed against the spectral image of bin Laden’s gruesome corpse and the unseemly jubilation that erupted after news of his death was broadcast, the Situation Room photograph can be interpreted as an implicit defense of the former and an indirect, yet surely calculated, rebuke of the latter. The serious, somber faces of Obama and Clinton seem to refute any claims that the decision to kill was reckless and to provide an air of gravity that tempers the revelers’ triumphal displays. The circulation of Souza’s photograph, with its emphasis on solemn duty and regrettable necessity, can be seen as a repositioning as well as a re-visioning of the dignified and moral high ground of a civil response to death, in what amounts to the latest, if most delicate, salvo in the war on terror. Specifically, by countering two forms of indecency—the display of graphic violence attributed to the spectral image of bin Laden’s corpse and the inappropriate joy that followed the news of his assassination—the model of gravity illustrated in the photo not only justifies this death (in response to possible objections that since the raid took place in Pakistan, it violated that nation’s sovereignty and that since Bin Laden was unarmed, shooting him violated international law) but also offers a sanctimonious response to it. If the unseemly jubilation of celebrants exposes a simmering uncouth and uncivil underside to public culture in a way that betrays newfound vows to civility made only a few short months earlier, the Situation Room photo attempts to recommit the United States to the solemn and burdensome task of civility. The juxtaposition between the photographs exposes the close connection between civility and citizenship. This book unpacks the nuanced relationship between these two complex concepts. While this book cannot help but take account of the war on terror that has dominated national life in the past decade, it does so tangentially; it remains for another scholar and a much larger book to address directly and fully the war on terror’s strategic deployment of images. Instead, my interest here is on the way model citizens emerge as racialized figures. In Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture, my modest aim is to provide a critical description of these curious figures and to challenge the binary terms with which civility is commonly approached. So pervasive is this binary between model and shameful forms of deportment, between appropriate grief and unseemly triumph, that even though the scope of the National Institute for Civil Discourse is focused on nurturing vigorous political debate and defusing the kind of poisonous rancor that erupted after the Arizona shootings, its assumptions about the social and political role of civility remain caught within the Manichean terms civil and uncivil, good

Prologue  5

and bad; by implication, citizenship, a concept partially forged as a consequence of this controversial conduct, is likewise trapped within this limited framework. In part, this assumption is understandable, given that the etymological root of civil (L. civis, “townsman,” “resident of a city”) is shared with citizenship. Civics is the study of the rights and responsibilities of citizens. When Palin accuses her accusers of blood libel, of adopting the violent speech, the uncivil vitriol associated with the “Crosshairs” rhetoric, she effectively confirms this binary. Despite the fact that civis is associated with the courteous manners of citizens as opposed to soldiers, providing perhaps irrefutable justification for this assumption, the diversity of citizens within the city also connotes a political threat; civis may destabilize polis. I began research on this project years before, with a set of violent images that troubled me, and a set of questions about them (for example, is it proper to show them?), that found focus in the intertwined concepts of civility and citizenship. This was not a critical path that I anticipated pursuing. However, the material I was working with persistently nudged me toward and kept me on this path; the more I uncovered about civility, the more the relevance of this concept and its importance to citizenship emerged. The courteous foundation of citizenship is not as certain as the polarized terms of debates on civility would suggest. Is civility the precondition of citizenship? Can incivility be a basis of citizenship? What is the precise relationship between civility and citizenship? These are the questions foreclosed by an approach that assumes that proper conduct is the foundation for model citizenship. These are the questions that Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture takes up, in order to illustrate the multifarious forms that civility takes and to reveal its manifold effects in shaping citizenship.

Introduction Clasped Hands and Clenched Fists

I

t is May 10, 1869, and the mood is jubilant in Promontory Point, Utah, where workers have just finished joining two lines of the transcontinental railway that link the East with the West. To mark this momentous event, wine bottles are uncorked and hats are doffed. Strangers exchange smiles; hands clasp together. Photographers, commissioned by the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad companies, join the celebrations, but the photographs they take are not merely illustrations. Instead, like the railways they depict, the photographs participate in the act of nation building, contributing to the project of visual unification that Alan Trachtenberg has called the “American album.”1 The most iconic, taken by A. J. Russell, and often called Meeting of the Tracks or The Joining of the Rails, stands out for its attempt to bridge division2 (Figure I.1). If the transcontinental railroad constructs the nation, then this photograph suggests that those who helped build it are the nation’s citizens, deserving through their labor of that status and the recognition it entails. Yet as Asian American writers, critics, and historians have observed, in spite of Russell’s effort to take account of the many bodies that contributed to this monumental feat, the photograph erases Chinese coolies from the historical record.3 Rather than serving the ends of visual unification, the camera often functions, Anna Pegler-Gordon notes, as “a graphic metaphor” of exclusion.4 This emphasis on exclusion, familiar in Asian American studies, is only part of the photograph’s story, however. By spotlighting the handshake, the official title of the photograph, East Shakes Hands with West, offers a clue to its other, equally important story. Significantly, this grasp of hands between the civil engineers marks a civil gesture that symbolically, if incompletely, closes the

Introduction  7

Figure I.1  East Shakes Hands with West. (Photo by A. J. Russell. Courtesy of Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum, © 2011, CPRR.org.)

potential split symbolized by the blank space in the foreground. Within Russell’s photograph, the gentlemanly gesture of the handshake marks a moment of national belonging for the ideal subjects tactilely enfolded within its reach. At the same time, the handshake invokes the poignant limits of its grasp, those who are not symbolically incorporated within this gesture. Although a cultural history of the handshake has yet to be written, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty remind us of the gesture’s significance for constituting community; in their writings on ethics and intersubjectivity, the handshake is a privileged symbol of touching otherness.5 If this photograph enacts a longstanding practice of exclusion, it does so through a differentiating discourse of civility, compensating for the absence marked by this foreground blank space (and the exclusions that this space marks) with the fullness of the bodies crowding the space. Civility mediates presence and absence, subject and object, exclusion and unification, civility and citizenship. This book explores the cultural implications of this complex mediation. The civil engineers’ handshake in Russell’s photograph is only one of many gestures extended at moments when the parameters of citizenship are most vexed and contested. More than merely an accidental detail in Russell’s iconic photograph, civility is a trope that surfaces in signal moments when

8 Introduction

the civil rights associated with citizenship are under greatest threat. Perhaps the most notorious use of photographs as a popular means of constructing national identity occurred during World War II, as a means of protecting the “good” citizen, then the law-abiding Chinese American, against his “bad” counterpart, the enemy alien, the Japanese American, who, in the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, was stripped of civil liberties. A brief primer in Life offered what the magazine described as the “handbook for Americans,” relying on photographs to provide guidance on “how to tell Japs from the Chinese.”6 In this primer, photographs, cursive script, and typescript intersect to parallel the triangulation between the groups that the feature describes as “U.S. citizens”; “U.S. Chinese,” who are victims of undeserved “emotional outburst[s]”;7 and the true culprits, the Japanese, who are “enemy aliens.”8 According to this formulation, the citizen evaluates noncitizens, suggesting that the category of citizenship is constructed through encounters with photography in addition to more familiar sites of engagement such as the law. At the same time, citizens are advised, however indirectly, to comport themselves civilly—that is, to exercise judgment about their behavior, by judging first that the offending subjects deserve their wrath. Civility triangulates the unmarked but obviously white “citizen,” the “bad” enemy alien, and the “good” U.S. Chinese, within a constantly contested continuum of citizenship that obscures the arbitrariness of these categories by normalizing them. Sociologist Claire Jean Kim proposes the concept of “racial triangulation” to explain the complex constituencies of Asian America, which are formed in relation to the racialization of whiteness and blackness.9 Although the Afro-Asian nuances of this process, which are explored in a number of important studies, are not my primary concern here, my approach to varied racial encounters within this book upholds while unsettling Yen Le Espiritu’s notion of Asian American “panethnicity” (or strategic alliances between disparate groups) by drawing inspiration from the dynamic dimensions of the concept of triangulation.10 Indeed, embodied forms of civility are often posed as answers to such troubling questions about citizenship as: Who is a citizen? What are the rights of citizenship, and who may claim these rights? This book also argues that at still other times, civility serves as a strategic resistance to these provisional answers, which can be as troubling as the questions that they address. Civility, in other words, “frames” or shapes the meanings of citizenship. In so doing, civility also articulates and disarticulates the parameters of Asian America. Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture explores civility’s critical role in defining and redefining citizenship. Civility is so central to the formation of Asian America that it lies at the heart of one of the community’s most familiar and controversial figures, the model minority. A figure that debuted in 1966 with the publication of William

Introduction  9

Petersen’s infamous New York Times Magazine article, “Success Story, JapaneseAmerican Style,”11 but was anticipated decades earlier, the model minority casts a long shadow that continues to influence debates on citizenship today. Described as “deeply ambivalent,”12 the model minority inspires commentary about the figure’s varied ideological functions: as evidence of success to be emulated by other minorities;13 as an inspiring touchstone for the rejuvenation of white Americans who, to their chagrin, find themselves questioning their formerly certain moral, intellectual, and economic superiority;14 as an equivocal discourse embraced by some as an affirmative mode of self-identification;15 as no less injurious a stereotype as the Yellow Peril specters that it ostensibly replaced and for that reason, to be disparaged; or, even more complexly, as a double-edged means of generating cultural and social capital through an exploitive “system of signification.”16 Despite Victor Bascara’s astute observation that the model minority is unmatched as “a visible priority for Asian American mobilization,”17 however, these extensive debates are surprisingly consistent in their focus on productivity and self-sufficiency.18 Notably, proponents of the model minority myth focus on labor as the basis for achievement of full citizenship and its attendant rights of political representation and social recognition, aligning the efforts of the indentured laborer and his industrious descendants within the Horatio Alger fantasy of bootstrap gumption, obscuring the fact that, as Colleen Lye has convincingly shown, labor was the basis for exploitation and exclusion.19 Addressing a later moment, Robert G. Lee likewise notes that this aspect of what Frank Chin has elsewhere termed “racist love”20 (in contrast to the “racist hate” projected at other minorities) is produced within a Cold War context, in which “stoic patience, political obedience, and self-improvement was a critically important narrative of ethnic liberalism that simultaneously promoted racial equality and sought to contain demands for social transformation.”21 If the ideological battle waged abroad required “containing” enemies of capitalism, containment on the domestic front served a no less urgent function, as Lee also points out, of rewarding accommodation and assimilation while punishing militancy, as part of a carefully crafted policy to thwart communist propagandists eager to pounce on any signs of internal dissension. The model minority’s assimilability handily serves the ends of containment in a process that links, as Mary Dudziak persuasively argues, foreign and domestic policies within a framework of “Cold War Civil Rights.”22 On the one hand, the model minority myth seeks to remedy injurious exclusions from the full rights of political and social citizenship, dangling accommodation and assimilation as compensation for a history of exclusion and alienation. On the other hand, the remedy, premised on the Protestant work ethic of self-sufficiency, is at best partial, for it shifts the duties of

10 Introduction

Americanization and uplift to the shoulders of the aspiring immigrant and absolves the state from participation in, not to mention responsibility for, this process. At the same time, this aspect of the model minority myth retains a residue of foreignness: the very qualities that make the model minority a congenial subject for American accommodation and assimilation—silence, discipline, obedience—cause worry when they are construed as an inhuman penchant for deceptiveness and robotic hyperefficiency. Vilified as part of the Yellow Peril menace, the inscrutable Asian is thus, as Lye incisively points out, the obverse of the beneficent model minority, “two aspects of the same, long-running racial form, a form whose most salient feature, whether it has been made the basis for exclusion or assimilation, is the trope of economic selfsufficiency.”23 Despite the familiarity of this figure, or perhaps because of it, the model minority’s civility has gone unnoticed. Such an oversight is unremarkable, insofar as it is in keeping with a general tendency among scholars to overlook civility altogether. Indeed, this tendency is evident even within citizenship studies, where civility remains undertheorized. In fact, on the rare occasions that civility surfaces in discussions, the concept and such cognates as the civil and the civic are often collapsed within idealized characterizations of citizenship. Tellingly, the Oxford English Dictionary lists as its first definition of civility “the status of a citizen; citizenship.” When civility is addressed, critics take this concept for granted as a requirement of citizenship or as a virtue integral to American citizenship.24 Even when critics seem to acknowledge the myth’s civil dimensions, this partial recognition is subsumed within the narrative of success. Consider, for instance, Daniel Okimoto’s musings in the pioneering anthology Roots: An Asian American Reader. “The successes of the Japanese in mainland America have been predicated on a thoroughgoing accommodation to white-class norms,” Okimoto writes; “the high degree of conformity is evident in the general behavioral patterns of Nisei students: in the classroom they are extremely well-behaved, seldom make noise, never talk back to teachers, faithfully finish their school assignments on time. Neatly dressed, cleanly scrubbed, polite and deferential, Nisei on the whole would be among the last to join hippie communes or participate in avant-garde movements.”25 Naively loyal to the myth that marks their subjection, the Nisei—and other Asian Americans— accommodate the state’s implicit demands for obedience. By focusing on success and accommodation, Okimoto takes up the dominant themes of labor and industry, staples in debates on the model minority. And yet the characteristics of intelligence, thriftiness, and industry are not just associated with the Protestant work ethic. Considered along with attributes such as politeness and uncomplaining perseverance in the face of adversities such as racism, they are

Introduction  11

also hallmarks of civility. Through an implicit opposition between the civility of the model minority and the rudeness of the counterculture, Okimoto hints at the significance of civility at this crucial historical juncture—which marks the very inception of the Asian American movement—even though he and many other critics do not consciously recognize it as a defining feature of the model minority. More troublingly, he effectively dismisses the political potential of civility. Rather than amounting to a retreat from politics, as Okimoto seems to suggest, civility can be deployed, according to Susan Herbst, as “an asset or tool, a mechanism, or even a technology”26 for the purposes of political struggle. To highlight the profoundly political function of civility, Étienne Balibar even offers an idiosyncratic definition of the concept, which for him “designate[s] the speculative idea of a politics of politics.”27 Indeed, Okimoto’s association of quiescent conduct with discipline confirms Norbert Elias’s landmark analysis of civility’s primary role in the “civilizing process,”28 in which comportment of the body, increasingly fashioned according to norms favoring delicacy and restraint, helps govern appetite and subdue violence. Although Elias’s history of this process focuses on the shift from feudal courtesy to modern civility in the West, his theory of self-regulation as a means of efficient social control not only confirms Michel Foucault’s argument about the pervasiveness of surveillance; it is also pivotal in accounting for the contradictions of the ideal of civil society under colonial rule, in which civil conduct masks and defuses the violence that is this ideal’s disavowed origin. This self-control thesis inspires a range of theories, including Daniel Coleman’s study of white settler colonialism, which maintains that “civility operates as a mode of internal management”;29 Achille Mbembe’s analysis of colonial administration in Africa, where “the transformation of behavior, respect for binding agreements, and control of conduct . . . cannot be separated from the notion of civil society”;30 David Theo Goldberg’s critique of U.S. race relations, which similarly contends that “civil society and its attendant modes of civility are the spaces of accommodation to existing relations of social domination and order, racially inscribed”;31 and Lisa Lowe’s contention that the figure of the sexualized, laboring Asian body helps establish a spectrum of freedom and unfreedom through its role in shoring up humanism’s cherished ideals, the “modern constructions of freedom, civility, and justice.”32 This technique functions more subtly, however, than Elias’s focus on regulatory efficiency would suggest. As Coleman puts it, in the course of qualifying his analysis of settler colonialism, civility is “structurally ambivalent”;33 strategic comportment, the performative parodies that comprise practices of “wry” civility (a concept he develops in response to Homi Bhabha’s theorization of “sly civility”34), can be the basis for contesting the discipline that it ostensibly

12 Introduction

guarantees. Rather than functioning simply as a tool for domination and subordination, and for defining civil society solely as a project dependent on its disavowal of violence, civility helps construct civil society and the citizenship that legitimizes and delegitimizes the subjects of this society. Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz perhaps best capture civility’s malleability in their description of etiquette (their term for civility) as “the field of multifarious prescriptions governing comportment in life’s interactions”35 that elucidates the vital stakes of the process they cleverly call “being becoming,” the “profound sense in which manners, mere gestures, can provide an armature for living ethically.”36 The significance of the model minority’s distinctively civil comportment may accordingly be understood by taking account of other, contemporaneous civilities that guided the struggling civil rights movement at home; the escalating Cold War, which was flashing hot in proxy engagements abroad; and the political movements, focused on “power,” that emerged in solidarity with third world anticolonial resistance. As many cultural critics have observed, the introduction of the model minority in 1966—in the wake of the overturning of race-based limitations on immigration in 1965 and, particularly, during a pivotal moment of civil rights struggle—is hardly coincidental. Rather, its disciplinary civility can be seen as a calculated alternative to these other civilities. Perhaps most notably, during the civil rights movement—with which the Asian American movement was aligned and from which it drew inspiration— the exercise of civility, historian William Henry Chafe insists,37 sought to actualize the promises of political citizenship extended by the Fourteenth Amendment.38 For evidence of civility’s importance for the movement, consider Figure I.2, a famous photograph illustrating the solidarity and strength of protesters whose clasped hands forge a human chain. In her brilliant analysis of the vexed identifications enabled through civil rights photographs, Elizabeth Abel suggests that this intertwining of protesters’ hands not only offers a compelling symbol of the civil rights movement’s embrace of a politics of civility but also functions as an apt icon for Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theory of intersubjectivity, in illustrating his insistence, in “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” that community is predicated on the hand that touches and simultaneously feels itself being touched.39 For Merleau-Ponty, the handshake’s “reversibility,”40 its chiasmic crossing of flesh, actualizes the self’s inextricable connection with the other and marks the irreducible distance between these bodies. In intuitive recognition, perhaps, of the limitations of the handshake (which signaled, as we have seen, a foreclosure of community in the earlier icon of railway nation building), the protesters acknowledge this distance while seeking to overcome it. The human chain forged through the actual and metaphoric intertwining of hands dramatically transforms the vexed singularity of Merleau-Ponty’s handshake, which could at best only offer a grudging dualism. The power of

Introduction  13

Figure I.2  Civil Rights Demonstrators in Selma, Alabama 1965. (© Bettmann/Corbis.)

the intertwining of protesters’ hands, Abel suggests, lies in its durable commitment and potential for endless multiplication through the movement’s implicit yet unmistakable invitation to spectators to join the struggle.41 In addition to this direct engagement with the white gaze courted by such photographs, the civil rights movement attracted the attention of Asian Americans, whose own quickening political consciousness, as historians including Helen Zia and William Wei point out, was fueled through recognition of and identification with the struggle for equality.42 Even if they were rarely, if ever, photographed doing so, narratives of the emergence of the Asian American movement emphasize the inspirational example set by the civil rights struggle for integration, a struggle in which many Asian American leaders had cut their teeth through active participation. In this sense, the intertwined hands function as a symbol of unity, not only as a literal picture of unified bodies. Similarly, the image of intertwining suggests that the opposition between earnest and “wry” civilities is, as Pauline Wakeham perceptively cautions, an inadequately polarized structure for accounting for the subtleties and complexities of racial civilities within the United States.43 The other major source of inspiration for the Asian American movement—Black Power radicalism, with its spectacular guerrilla uniforms and striking gestures of outraged defiance, in particular the upraised fist— seems to offer a resounding contrast to the intertwined hands, however. The

14 Introduction

symbols of opposition taken up by proponents of yellow power, who were on the vanguard of the Asian American movement, further complicate the role of civility in the mid- to late 1960s, when the model minority emerged. What is the relationship between the outstretched hands of the civil rights movement and the upraised fists of radical empowerment? Some historians contend that the revolutionary gestures of the late 1960s are a rejoinder to the failures of the civil rights movement, as evident in the persistence of systemic inequalities despite the passage of Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act, as well as in the perceived inadequacies of civil disobedience for responding to the violence that increasingly stained watershed moments.44 In this context, the clenched fists of black and yellow power revolutionaries mark an emphatic rejection of the clasped hands associated with civil disobedience. As part of a strategy that Trent H. Hamann calls “impolitics,”45 these fists appear to repudiate the clasped hands’ attendant civilities. And yet, rather than breaking from the human chain’s intertwining, the trope of the fist retains the civil rights movement’s commitment to community coalitions. Confirmation of the clenched fists’ similar allegiances can be found in the fact that this gesture of resistance—which art historian Lincoln Cushing traces to agitprop posters distributed in 191746 —is a staple in the rhetorical arsenal of many socialist, revolutionary groups (and not limited to black revolutionaries), who sought solidarity and found commonalities in the course of their anticolonial struggles. The unexpected meeting of the outstretched hands and upraised fists in this way illustrates the overlapping of apparently competing civilities, suggesting in turn that the civil rights and radical power movements were in greater agreement than even their participants were willing to admit. The Asian American movement formed in their wake likewise embraced these forms of civility. During this tumultuous period, then, the model minority’s civility is not simply its defining feature; it also serves as a means of ideologically combating competing civilities. Against this backdrop, the model minority’s comportment not only drives a stake through the civil rights movement’s human chain but also is an affront to the upraised fists and the symbolic alliances that both gestures offered. Just as important, the model minority accomplished this through not a rejection but rather a redefinition of civility. Petersen’s article helpfully illustrates this alternative civility in its inclusion of photographs of Japanese Americans at work cultivating the land. These illustrations offer an oblique demonstration of a different approach to civility through an emphasis on cultivation—a discourse that, as I show in Chapter 2, can be traced at least as far back as the internment period. Cultivation emerges as a twentiethcentury extension of the nineteenth-century handshake, where the laboring hand need not necessarily extend to grasp and enfold the other in a gesture of

Introduction  15

national belonging. Its extension toward the land and its promise of patient cultivation of this land suffices as a synecdoche for nation building, which is rooted in a naturalizing mythology. At a time when minority groups fiercely laid claim to these rights, and when political citizenship potentially was being extended toward groups previously denied immigration, the emergence of civility in the form of cultivation aimed to curtail these unprecedented developments. Okimoto’s musings on the model minority can best be understood in light of this fraught historical backdrop. In his reflections on the civil conduct of compliant students, Okimoto contrasts their apolitical acquiescence with the political rebellion (or civil disobedience) of the fractious counterculture and its unsettling incivility. The civil conduct he singles out, by contrast, acts as a safety valve against the potential rupture posed by these groups. While the civility associated with the model minority myth is the basis for the belated dispensation of social citizenship, its exemplarity as a mode of apolitical conduct, or at the very least conduct that does not question the legitimacy of systemic injustices, defuses the direct action associated with these other forms of resistance, the civil rights and yellow power movements. As model citizen, the model minority stands opposed to civil subjects with their troublesome demands for the rights of citizenship. The discourse of civility, as articulated in the figure of the model minority, is the means by which countercultural rebellion is rendered “uncivil.” Civility is thus an important means by which citizenship is articulated and disarticulated. Picturing Model Citizens reveals that civility plays a crucial role in the construction of citizenship, and the book argues that this profoundly embodied process, which significantly plays out in visual culture, forms “Asian American” subjects variously in contrast and affinity with other national subjects. The book explores the wide range of forms in which civility appears: intimacy’s sentimental project of molding proper deportment in the early twentieth century; the discourse of cultivation as a means of rhetorically managing the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and as a strategy for redress in the aftermath of this decision to suspend civil rights; the equivocal manner that attends efforts to extend informal apologies in response to American violence within the Pacific theater of war; and the etiquette of hygiene that emerges as a biopolitical means of securing borders in the wake of the war on terror. Tracking civility within Asian American visual culture, Picturing Model Citizens uncovers the varied manifestations of this remarkably resilient trope and assesses its implications for the making and unmaking of national citizenship. Although the law may appear to be an obvious site for investigating the construction of citizenship, visual culture—as a means of serving the varied

16 Introduction

ends of state surveillance47 and legal corroboration and, most obviously, as a conspicuous feature of official documents48 —can also be a powerful medium for exploring these concepts. As Pegler-Gordon argues, the emergence of visual identification for the purposes of immigration and naturalization in the United States is a process that, in coinciding with the enactment of the Page Law, demonstrates how this requirement was, from the start, profoundly racializing.49 Art historians, who surmise that photography may actually have been invented in the eighteenth century, before Louis Daguerre’s official announcement of his invention in 1839, have even begun to speculate about a possible homology between this technological development and the conceptual development of modern citizenship in the wake of the French Revolution.50 Even though the official use of photography within citizenship documents would not be possible until the introduction of halftone printing in the late nineteenth century, their coincidental emergence suggests that use of photographs was, from the start, anticipated within citizenship theory. Besides official records, a wide range of photographs was generated to depict and define citizenship. Because, as we have seen in these earlier examples, citizenship is neither determined solely by immigration officers nor defined exclusively through the law, this analysis necessarily departs from, while also extending, the more familiar critical race studies approach. Picturing Model Citizens draws direct inspiration rather from Ariella Azoulay’s provocative insight into the “civil contract of photography,” in which encounters between photographer, subject, and spectator shape the concept of citizenship. Instead of illustrating citizenship, this theory of the civil contract undermines widely held assumptions that any one agent (especially the operator who often acts on behalf of the state through instrumental practices) can claim exclusive ownership of images, and instead proposes that photography provides an alternative civic space. So pervasive are these assumptions that they guide approaches to Russell’s iconic photograph. For, in their implicit contrast of agential photographer and passive subject/spectator, these approaches uphold a common premise that the photograph comprises, foremost, the picture’s taker and, secondarily, those who appear—and do not appear—within the picture. The eye of the camera (the optic), synecdoche for the labor of the photographer, thus exerts force against a racialized hand (the haptic) of a different kind of labor altogether, synecdoche for the coolie who is conspicuously absent from the scene.51 (Although the photographer is also absent, the scene itself is evidence of his presence.) While the spectator’s position receives less attention, one assumes, following this logic, that it is likewise fixed. This quality of fixity is, for David Eng, the overdetermined “given-to-be-seen” feature of the photograph52 and, for Homi Bhabha, explains the intractability of the stereotype.53 From this perspective, the photographic “frame” can be seen as an organizing technique that

Introduction  17

suspends photographer, subject, and spectator in a frozen hierarchy.54 Picturing Model Citizens introduces ways of looking otherwise. Looking otherwise requires re-viewing the photograph within a broader context of visual practices. For example, although historians frequently refer (as I do here) to an iconic photograph marking the celebration of the historic event at Promontory Point, the multiple images, sometimes uncredited and at other times credited to Russell’s rival, photographer C. R. Savage, used to illustrate this fact suggest there is no agreement about which photographer, composition, and subject actually constitutes this iconic image. Although only subtle differences exist between these varying views (for example, the champagne or wine bottles are suspended in midair at slightly higher or lower angles, and, despite the fact that the subjects are captured in different poses, there are no Chinese coolies among them), the seeming interchangeability of these images nonetheless challenges any claim that a singular camera perspective, that a dominant eye, exerts mastery over the scene.55 The photograph of national unification is, rather, a compilation of varying photographs whose circulation attests to the dynamism of photographic encounters. Indeed, a companion image, also taken by Russell earlier that same day, further complicates the discourse of exclusion constructed by East Shakes Hands with West. Titled Chinese at Laying Last Rail UPRR (Figure I.3), this image, unlike his more famous document of the celebration, is a stereograph, a doubled picture,56 which, when viewed through a stereoscope, the equipment specially designed for such purposes, provided the impression of depth and closeness, the illusion of threedimensional space.57 Whereas the later photograph clearly is constructed as a means of characterizing its subjects as spectators conscious of the camera, who gaze directly into the lens and pose before it, the earlier image depicts two groups of subjects, spectators and workers. Here, instead of looking at the camera, spectators crowd around the workers, looking at the hands that are the unmistakable, if barely visible, concern of the stereograph. That the workers do not look back explicitly illustrates the split between hand and eye only implicit in the photograph, a rebuke of the gaze that seeks to suture, or worse yet, to deny this split altogether. The doubled view afforded by the stereograph extends the photograph’s limited gaze and serves as an anticipatory rejoinder to critics’ protests against that frame’s exclusionary logic. Even though this stereograph represents Asian Americans in visual culture, the civility that informs its visual codes suggest that such images are nevertheless part of Asian American visual culture. The optic and haptic meet when the eye of the camera/photographer records and recognizes this clasp of hands—and the civilities and incivilities that this union of bodies encodes. In this juxtaposition of haptic and optic, the photograph of the handshake, sign of civility, is the gesture that at once

18 Introduction

Figure I.3  Chinese at Laying Last Rail UPRR. (Photo by A. J. Russell, Stereoview #539. Courtesy of Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum, © 2011, CPRR.org.)

connects—and disconnects—viewers, actors/spectators, and photographer through the limits of its enfolding grasp. Indeed, this concern with the haptic and the optic evident in both the photograph and stereograph taken by Russell exemplifies the materiality of visual culture that is for numerous theorists a defining feature of this “carnal medium,” Roland Barthes’s term denoting photography’s profoundly embodied dimensions.58 To track the story of civility’s negotiation with citizenship within visual culture, then, is to track the body’s inextricable engagement with this process. Looking otherwise requires attentiveness to the civility that guides these embodied encounters, defines citizenship, and shapes national identity. That such encounters potentially continue past the seemingly frozen image unsettles the fixity of other approaches to looking and helps activate what Jill Bennett describes, in her theory of the affective politics of trauma in art, as an ethics of witnessing.59 In offering ways of looking otherwise, this book provides a new approach to understanding civility and citizenship by exploring the significance of visual culture as a means through which embodied performers actively construct these concepts. And yet my emphasis on linkages between civility and citizenship against a contested national backdrop departs from an important aspect of Azoulay’s concept of the civil contract of photography. For Azoulay, this concept rehabilitates modern citizenship from the corrupting influence of the nationstate form that, she argues, had co-opted it almost since its inception in the eighteenth century. This defense of the concept of citizenship is by no means

Introduction  19

unusual. As is apparent from the numerous Asian American scholars, artists, and activists who remain attached to this mode of subject formation, the project of “becoming citizen” is far from over, and affirmations of commitment to this goal, despite acknowledgment of its structural limitations, can be found, among others, in the work of Lisa Lowe and John S. W. Park.60 Nevertheless, the rehabilitation of modern citizenship requires suturing the seemingly irrevocable split between man and citizen introduced within one of the concept’s founding documents, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. For citizenship theorists, this split is troubling because the protections (of life, liberty, and pursuits, whether of property or the less tangible happiness) guaranteed to the citizen inevitably put the human at risk. This split, which Giorgio Agamben calls a “hendiadys,”61 produces what Azoulay describes as the central problem of the nation-state’s formulation of citizenship: “a residue of noncitizens [is produced] alongside the citizen population. This residue—which is huge and scattered across the face of the globe—taints all of the world’s citizens with the epidemic of noncitizenship and threatens to undermine their own citizenship.”62 Rejecting Agamben’s effort to redress this injustice by abandoning citizenship in favor of refugee subjectivity, Azoulay justifies her attempt to rescue citizenship on the grounds that its enduring political value makes it impossible to dispense with altogether. Azoulay’s task of preserving the ideal of “becoming citizen” through the “civil contract of photography” as an alternative civic space depends, however, on eluding the traps associated with nationstate sovereignty. But, as Agamben implicitly acknowledges, this may not be possible given the resilience of the nation-state, whose stubborn influence is manifest in diverse fields and is specifically durable within the visual field, where instrumental photography, as John Tagg, Allan Sekula, Jonathan Finn, and many others argue, remains a privileged site for the constitution—and contest—of sovereign power.63 Discounting the significance of the nation-state may be just as premature as dispensing with the concept of citizenship. Before citizenship can be rehabilitated, its significance must first be reconsidered. Picturing Model Citizens adopts this necessary approach. Rather than being constructed beyond the nation-state, the dynamic encounters that this book traces take place if not always wholly within, then frequently in tension with the nation-state’s parameters. That these parameters are not fixed reflects both the dynamism of these civil engagements and the nation-state’s own structural instabilities, which have become ever more uncertain and yet, at times, remain contrarily entrenched in response to the pressures of globalization’s restructuring of boundaries and consequent challenge to sovereign power. Indeed, perhaps in partial acknowledgment of these developments, scholars have recently introduced the concept of biological citizenship—a concept that Chapters 3 and 4 take up more extensively. Defined as the forms of

20 Introduction

subjection produced as the result of a discursive concern with the body’s condition of fragile bare life (in contrast with the more conventional concerns with the geographical boundaries of identity or the “imagined communities” that national identity produces),64 biological citizenship offers a provocative way of considering the extraterritorial dimensions of political subjectivities whose health and security, as I show in my discussion of the etiquette that governs the discourse of “Racial Hygiene” (Chapter 4), are paradoxically regulated from behind the fault lines of the nation-state. The concept of biological citizenship also highlights the primacy of the body as focus for, and means of negotiating, sovereign power across the shifting parameters of the nation-state—the very body that arguably serves as one of the core, ongoing concerns of citizenship. The spaces of civility are thus just as important to consider as the bodies engaged in performances of civility’s manifold gestures. In its fraught uncertainty, this spatial dimension of the mediation of civility and citizenship often ends up exposing the U.S. nation-state’s fractures, contradictions that in turn have shaped the constituency of Asian America in overlapping networks simultaneously focused on a domestic framework (of claiming national belonging) and in relationship to transnational affiliations (with their vexed allegiances to sites within East Asia and Southeast Asia). Addressing the complexities of these linkages requires a comparative approach that attends to these fault lines; that explains the ways that civility, in its often misrecognized multifarious forms, navigate them; and that accounts for the varied communities that are shaped in their wake. The book is accordingly structured around 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). This book attends to boundaries that are variously guarded and challenged through contested forms of propriety. At each of these sites, Picturing Model Citizens explores the multifarious forms of civility that emerge as ways of defining citizenship, in encounters that in turn stretch the parameters of Asian America. Although the book’s shifts between diverse sites within and beyond the U.S. nation-state may initially seem unexpected, bringing these cases together is the most effective way of exposing the differential logic of citizenship, as a technique that in turn redraws the parameters of Asian America. The book is also organized into sections focused on illuminating forms of civility pivotal to the varied approaches to citizenship taken by Asian Americans. These forms emerge as a partial response to specific challenges associated

Introduction  21

with these sites. By tracking the recurrence of the trope of civility across a wide range of visual texts spanning the late nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries, Picturing Model Citizens also shows that these gestures take manifold yet irreducibly embodied forms, such as the handshake, the bow, and the smile. Gestures of civility involve extending bodies toward each other (as with the bow and the handshake) or are variously inscribed on bodies (as with the smile), at the same time that they can render other bodies invisible and illegible (as with the engineers’ handshake). Tracking a range of photographic encounters, then, I examine multifarious forms of civility—sentimental comportment, cultivation of landscape, manner of apology, and etiquette of hygiene—and reveal their centrality to debates on Asian American citizenship. Chapter 1 explores the domestic, intimate spaces of the Asian American family—and the ethnic enclaves to which they were restricted—by considering how civility overlaps with discourses of sentimental comportment. In the early twentieth century, the ethnic enclave was a site of such concern for legislators and moral reformers that regulations regarding Chinese and Japanese immigration to the United States, and projects undertaken in its aftermath, in part stemmed from worries about the extent to which these strangers and aliens could be civilized. Focusing on bourgeois family portraiture, the medium through which a civilizing etiquette perhaps finds most eloquent expression, this chapter considers the convergence of this personal genre with the state’s keen concern with the visual surveillance of its subjects.65 By considering a wide range of photographs produced at and on the edges of the ethnic enclave, including Arnold Genthe’s famous Chinatown Album, vernacular images taken by less familiar commercial and amateur Chinese American photographers such as civil rights pioneer Mary Tape, as well as portraits exchanged as part of the Japanese “picture bride” practice, this chapter reveals how photography provides a model for the sentimental comportment of family as a means of regulating the intimacies of these sexualized foreign figures. I argue that Genthe’s camera work highlights the importance of a bourgeois emphasis on sentimental deportment and its attendant concern with propriety. He does so in a manner that lends visual support to the missionary practice of his friend, Donaldina Cameron, who sought to rehabilitate—in an unmistakably civilizing mission—the women of Chinatown, who were, in her view, most vulnerable to its unsavory influences. By contrast, other images, most no-­ tably the portraits exchanged as part of the picture bride phenomenon as well as those taken by Asian American photographers such as On Char, constitute a counterarchive that, through the agency of photographic collage, reunited, symbolically if not literally, family members separated as a result of these laws. While On Char’s family portraits have received less attention than those by Genthe, their circulation across the Pacific contests the spatial constraints

22 Introduction

enforced by the aesthetics of exclusion, while at the same time affirming bourgeois domestic ideology. The picture bride photographs likewise constitute an alternative imaging practice that encoded brides and grooms who participated in the practice of proxy marriages as modern subjects who fashioned their images according to a contemporary style. Largely illegible to immigrant officers, who tended to look for likeness in photographs, such images were subsequently recoded, reincorporated within immigration documents as a partially successful means of ensuring that such marriages conformed to expectations that liking function as the basis for unions. Civility also informs other key visual mediations of Asian American citizenship appearing during World War II in the photographs of Japanese American internment produced by a wide range of photographers, including those working under the auspices of the War Relocation Authority (WRA), as well as those who worked independently. Besides constituting a state of exception, the internment, as Elena Tajima Creef observes,66 marks the introduction of Japanese Americans to U.S. visual culture. Extending Creef’s insights as well as Jasmine Alinder’s important historical study of internment photography and its afterlives,67 I argue that despite the wide range of approaches that photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Clem Albers, and Toyo Miyatake adopted, their work nevertheless displayed an implicit and at times explicit engagement with landscape ideology—an ideology striking in its concern, as noted earlier, with cultivation of the land. In Chapter 2, I argue that this emphasis on cultivation—an exterior focus on the land that served as a means of representing a putatively internal civilizing process—enabled the state to salve its conscience regarding the treatment of the internees, reconciling the contradictions of Executive Order 9066 (which suspended the rights of citizenship for many of Japanese descent who were citizens) by imagining, not to mention imaging, many of these internees as themselves reconciled to its material deprivations. This agricultural concern effectively naturalizes the internment by linking internees with the land and symbolically rehabilitates their alleged misconduct through this civilizing comportment. An alternative to this discourse of cultivation is unexpectedly offered, however, in the work of internees who were photographers. Perhaps most famously, the photographs of Toyo Miyatake, who spent the war years at Manzanar camp, countered celebratory accounts of the success of the camps’ agricultural programs. Additionally, the less well-known work of still other internee photographers (such as Hikaru “Carl” Iwasaki, Henry Ushioka, and Yone Kubo) who were, surprisingly, hired by the WRA Photography Division, further complicated the discourse of cultivation. Although some of these other photographs taken by internees working on behalf of the WRA confirmed the agency’s signature social realism and its associated celebration of agricultural labor, at other times

Introduction  23

their photographs abandoned this style altogether, adopting instead still-life conventions as a means of challenging the discourse of cultivation. And yet in the aftermath of the internment, landscape ideology, with its stress on cultivation, nevertheless resurfaced in the redress movement also, through recourse to a strategy of apology that downplayed complaint by instead foregrounding obedient sacrifice. Such a strategy in effect drew on the discourse of civility as a means of broaching the issue of redress. Civility likewise serves as a foundation for the liberal humanist politics of reconciliation that motivated the medical philanthropic projects that took up indirectly the issue of apology in the aftermath, not just of violations of citizenship rights within the United States, but also of violence conducted in the Pacific theater of war. Chapter 3 turns to a consideration of the representation of these kinds of apologies in photojournalism, arguing that civility surfaces here in the form of an equivocal approach, a manner of reconciling this violence that avoids direct and explicit acknowledgment of responsibility or wrongdoing. Although this manner implicitly recognizes the fact of violence through forms of reconciliation such as medical philanthropy, ultimately it compensates for official redress and effectively rejects demands for reparation. Focusing on archival documents, images, and out-of-print documentary films that detail the spectacle of the “Hiroshima Maidens,” a group of twentyfive women horrifically scarred by atomic bomb exposure who were treated by plastic surgeons in the United States as part of an extraordinary exercise in medical philanthropy, and the ordeals of Kim Phuc, the so-called Napalm Girl depicted in the famous 1972 Vietnam War photograph, this chapter explores the significance of the figure of the scarred female body for establishing a transpacific network of altruism. Analysis of these emblematic victims, whose bodies signify not just the scars of war, but also the bonds that suture the United States to Pacific sites of violence, suggests the dual connotations of apology’s “manner”: it signifies a decorum attending its solicitation and reception that, in turn, may compensate for official state apology. At the end of the twentieth century, and in the wake of twinned fears focused on contagion and terror, civility manifests itself as a concern with the etiquette of hygiene. Chapter 4 focuses on depictions of the SARS crisis in photojournalism during a period in which the movement of citizens across increasingly securitized borders was limited and that gave rise to the invocation of Executive Order 13295, effectively authorizing quarantine as a form of detention in service of public health. During this crisis, American fears about the foreign “face” of contagion, represented in these widely circulated photographs, focused on the unstable meanings associated with the masks, which were supposed to contain the threat of contagion while at same time obscuring parts of the face. Within this fascination with the etiquette of hygiene,

24 Introduction

the prominence of “faciality” signals a shift in the comportment of the body that Levinas himself marked in his ethics of otherness, which turned from the hand to the face as a privileged sign for engaging in an ethics of otherness. This chapter examines the ways in which this mask functions as a “Sino-sign” that paradoxically denotes disfigurement and, in turn, gives rise to reterritorializations of the nation-state as a way of ensuring the health of citizens within newly retrenched borders—a pattern that has strikingly recurred in the wake of the H1N1 pandemic. As a predominantly Asiatic sign, the medical mask, for all its ostensible efficacy as an “etiquette” attending to preventive practices in response to renewed fears regarding global pandemics, may symbolically racialize the body long after biological theories of race have been discredited. I conclude the book with a postscript that explores the extent to which the mug shot—a portrait of a profoundly uncivil subject, the criminal—can be considered a document of citizenship, the flip side of, or negative to, instrumental images of surveillance such as the passport photo. Focusing on the transit and refugee photographs of Cambodian Americans collected within the exhibition More Than a Number, I contrast the “good citizen”68 described in Judith Shklar’s classic account of American citizenship with the Asian American “bad subject,” a figure whom Viet Nguyen identifies as important for Asian American studies but whom I mobilize in very different ways.69 I depart from Nguyen’s analysis by defining this latter subject as the criminal who, after being disqualified from the protection of the state through “uncivil” comportment, is, following the enactment of repatriation laws, expelled from its confines. These laws particularly affected Cambodian American youths who, after immigrating as refugees in the aftermath of the 1970s genocide, as permanent residents—and as not yet naturalized citizens—were vulnerable to legal confusions. If, as Agamben notes, the refugee is, according to modern definitions of citizenship, neither human nor citizen, the “bad subject,” too, marks the limits of citizenship, in which the incivility of crime serves as an affront to national belonging. Like the refugee, then, the criminal is, in the continuum of subjectivity that is the legacy of the French Revolution, neither human nor citizen. The mug shot with its imperative to fix its referent serves as a means of ascribing a category, if not an identity, to the bad subject. Picturing Model Citizens thus traces the varied manifestations of the trope of civility and reveals the fraught ways that this trope articulates and disarticulates citizenship for the subjects who are engaged within a range of photographic encounters. Whether manifest in discussions about propriety, hygiene, apology, and criminality, emphasis on civility in photographic visual culture depends on the gendered discourse of sentiment to domesticate subjects through tutelage in etiquette and constitutes alternately a pattern of pacification, in which civility compensates for the rights of citizenship, and a subtle

Introduction  25

strategy of subversion, by which the scope of citizenship within the United States is broadened. The book shows that the model minority is only one of many Asian American figures to be shaped by civility. Unearthing the multifarious forms of civility, this book reveals the resilience and flexibility of this trope as well as, ultimately, its keen influence in shaping the constituencies of Asian America in relation to U.S. national identity.

1 Spectacles of Intimacy and the Aesthetics of Domestication

R

are is the person who is satisfied with her passport photo. Instead, she may feel a sense of misrecognition1 and wonder whose face gazes unsmiling back at her. Set against the requisite unflattering plain (“white or off-white”) background in accord with the strict regulations outlined by the passport office that also stipulate the precise dimensions of the holder’s face (“⅛ to ⅜ inches”) as well as the size of the portrait itself (“2 × 2 inches”), it nevertheless matters little if she recognizes herself, so long as border guards do.2 Identifying the citizen with the photo she carries among her documents is a necessary condition for the smooth transit of bodies across national borders. The standardization of the passport photo is meant to ensure efficient verification of citizenship.3 Accordingly the principle of likeness that Alan Trachtenberg singles out as the underlying premise of the portrait also governs an increasingly bureaucratic process; the passport photograph is primarily concerned with this quality of resemblance.4 Yet, as Lily Cho astutely points out, the very rigidity of these regulations ironically betrays an anxiety about the representation of citizenship, suggesting perhaps that the state cannot wholly recognize its citizens.5 The rules that we take for granted arguably attest not to the state’s efficiency when it comes to identifying citizens and noncitizens but rather to its inefficiency. Although John Torpey argues that these rules were consolidated only recently in the mid-twentieth century as a means of compensating for this inefficiency,6 Anna Pegler-Gordon contends that 1930 marks the year when immigration officials first began standardizing the practice of collecting photographs.7 According to Eithne Luibhéid, however, these rules were first

Spectacles of Intimacy and the Aesthetics of Domestication  27

formulated in the United States as early as the late nineteenth century, in response to epistemological crises posed by the bodies of Asian women.8 In the wake of the Page Act of 1875, barring “undesirables” from entry to the United States on the grounds that they excited men to “lewd and immoral acts,”9 immigration officials were charged with determining whether these women were wives with a legitimate claim of reuniting with their families, or prostitutes whose claim to entry was illegitimate. The inclusion of photographs within official files reveals, Luibhéid contends, the centrality of the Asian female body for the establishment of an increasingly standardized process of identification. Just as important, intimacy was the foundation of this process. Intimacy is evident here in two ways. Not only were the photographs meant to disclose the bearer’s moral conduct in compliance with standards of propriety, but the prospective immigrant’s submission to the sentimental norms associated with the family was also a crucial qualification for entry. As Lisa Lowe argues in her analysis of the colonial archive, bourgeois intimacy “administered the enslaved and colonized and sought to indoctrinate the newly freed [indentured laborer] into forms of Christian marriage and family. The colonial management of sexuality, affect, marriage, and family among the colonized formed a central part of the microphysics of colonial rule.”10 Moreover, this regulatory framework focused on the figure of the Chinese female—and, as we will shortly see, the Japanese female as well—for securing divisions between public and private spheres. These figures secure “civility” in imitation of the European bourgeois model, so that, as Lowe observes, “this fantasy of Chinese family civility was a way of marking a racial difference between ‘Chinese free labor’ and ‘Negro slaves,’ through imagining the Chinese as closer to liberal ideas of human person and society.”11 A densely layered analytic approach whose manifold theoretical valences (as spatial proximity, as haunting of empire, as the blurring of private and public spheres, among others) are still being unpacked,12 intimacy is a form of civility that functions as a means of regulating and restricting the movements of bodies, and for identifying citizens and noncitizens. Before the formal consolidation of passport photo regulations, bourgeois portraits of families and individuals—whose likenesses were exchanged as a way of facilitating the formation of bourgeois families—aptly helped enforce and navigate increasing immigration restrictions. These included (1) the Page Law of 1875, which has the dubious distinction of being the first federally implemented immigration legislation and was, as noted earlier, effective in dramatically reducing the numbers of Asian women in the United States; (2) the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which, until its repeal with the Magnuson Act of 1943, suspended Chinese immigration; (3) the Gentlemen’s Agreement between the United States and Japan in 1907–1908, which restricted

28  Chapter 1

immigration of the Japanese to the families and wives of laborers who were already in the United States; and (4) the Immigration Act of 1924, which nullified the Gentlemen’s Agreement and banned all Asian immigration. While these varied acts targeted different constituencies, they shared a manifest concern with regulating the sexualized bodies of Asian women and a fervent conviction in the bourgeois family and the civilities associated with this institution as a means of doing so. These twin desires found visual expression, as PeglerGordon observes, through the camera. Visual domestication was a means by which tightened spatial restrictions, a consequence of these laws, agreements, and acts, were enforced and unexpectedly challenged. Focusing on the visual culture of 1885–1924, this chapter explores the spectacles of intimacy that unfold directly and implicitly not only as a result of but also in response to these significant developments in immigration legislation. However, the styles of honorific and repressive photographs were at times even less distinct than historians have recognized because, as Allan Sekula has shown, at this pivotal early period the “shadow archive” of instrumental realism was still assembling its most powerful artifacts.13 In addition to the instrumental images enlisted in the service of the biopolitical management of populations, honorific portraits, family photographs, and even street photography establish the look—and feel—of intimacy. Accordingly, my consideration of the spectacles of intimacy necessarily also looks outside the bureaucratic archive spotlighted in important historical studies by Luibhéid and Pegler-Gordon, which respectively reveal the centrality of Chinese women for the regulatory use of photography at the border and show how visual culture helps shape immigration law, to take account of everyday photographic practices. By instead exploring a wide range of photographs that complicate and unsettle the convergence between honorific bourgeois presentations of the self and instrumental representations of the subject, I argue that civility is a technique for welcoming proper (or well-behaved) bodies and for rehabilitating improper ones. Not just evident in the files that documented their moral health and physical fitness, this technique also finds powerful expression in the more stylized work of internationally renowned Pictorialist Arnold Genthe, whose pictures of Chinatown’s streets and its denizens (c. 1904) tacitly affirmed the exclusion laws while lending visual justification for moral reform missions such as those led by Mission House director Donaldina Cameron.14 At the same time, civility is a tactic, in Michel de Certeau’s sense of everyday resistance, for countering this disciplinary framework.15 At around this same time, the work of less well-known commercial and amateur Chinese photographers, such as On Char and the civil rights crusader Mary Tape, contested civility’s intimate account of proper deportment by

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providing an alternative definition of domesticity. The significance of domesticity would be further challenged in a slightly later period marked by the Gentlemen’s Agreement, which picks up after Genthe’s nostalgic portrayal of Chinatown ends. During 1908–1924, the “picture bride” practice of proxy marriages, facilitated by the exchange of honorific portraits, affirmed immigration policy’s heteronormative privileging of bourgeois family civility. Yet, because these portraits were subsequently incorporated within official immigration files as documents of likeness meant to corroborate the identities of their bearers, the photographs also confounded a cherished sentimental ideal of the bourgeois family: romantic affect. By putting pressure on the relationship between “likeness” and “liking,” the picture bride practice stretched the boundaries of the domestic framework of national belonging. During a period when the status of citizenship was beyond the reach of many immigrants of Asian origin who were denied the right to naturalization, and when the civil rights associated with citizenship were only partially granted to the few who attained this status by virtue of birth, discourses of intimacy helped shape civility as an answer to, and compensation for, this status and its associated rights.

Chinatown Album It was here [America] I belonged, in this new country which had broadened my horizons, opened my eyes to a new conception of life and shown me a way to satisfy my desire for beauty. Having absorbed something of the American spirit of independence, I made my decision according to my own lights. I took my first step on my career as a portrait photographer. I started in search of a studio. —Arnold Genthe, As I Remember

Toward the end of Bone, Fae Myenne Ng’s novel about suicide and survival, Leila attempts to conjure the “spirit of the oldtimers” (the bachelor-husbands of Chinatown) and of her dead sister Ona by invoking a photograph.16 Though this ekphrastic moment is arguably a staple of Asian American literature— photographs feature almost as prominently as food as figures for collective memory and family history—the reference is as suggestive as it is poignant. For Leila does not look at just any picture, nor is this picture part of a personal archive. The photograph that helps her see more clearly her relationship with the sister she has just lost depicts two girls who hold hands and glance backward at the photographer and viewer. Titled Their First Photograph, the photograph was taken by Arnold Genthe and included in his popular collection Old Chinatown, a book that nostalgically conjured the exoticism of an ethnic

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Figure 1.1  Their First Photograph. (Photo by Arnold Genthe. LC-G40850173, Library of Congress.)

enclave after its destruction (Figure 1.1).17 In looking backward, Genthe’s girls in the photo see themselves being seen; likewise, in looking at the photograph Leila imagines she can see herself and her family. Ng’s narrative can be read as a literary reframing of this photographic frame, an attempt to reclaim the girls represented within Their First Photograph as more than mere exotics that satisfied the curiosity of white spectators. Whose photograph is it and to whom does it belong? Leila’s encounter with the photograph suggests the possibility of identifying with its subjects, so that the “first” of the title is symbolically redefined here not only to denote this visual landmark but also to insert her family’s perspective within it. Through this encounter, the photograph thus is reclaimed as a first for Leila and her sister. By contrast, what might such a photograph and more generally the practice of photography have meant for Genthe, who was a recent immigrant himself when he took this picture? In 1895, a young German tutor for a European family set sail for the new world. Landing first in New York City, he ultimately settled in San Francisco, where he established himself as one of the bustling city’s most popular studio photographers. By the time of Arnold Genthe’s arrival, the city had already

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been settled and, with the West tamed, arguably the last frontier was not the wilderness beyond the city, but rather its perceived internal wildness, Chinatown. Describing Chinatown as a “city within a city,” Genthe’s memoir reveals a desire for authentically primitive experiences: “There is a vagabond streak in me which balks at caution. As soon as I could make myself free, I was on my way to Chinatown, where I was to go again and again, for it was this bit of the Orient set down in the heart of a Western metropolis that was to swing my destiny into new and unforeseen channels.”18 Genthe’s photographic encounters with Chinatown were adventures in a wilderness and, as the epigraph to this section suggests, a means by which he symbolically claimed America. Despite the fact that Genthe’s trade depended on portraiture, he attempted to rectify the triteness of the studio through his photographic peregrinations. In an article for Camera Craft, he revealed his scorn for these conventions, listing its associated contrivances: Throne-like chairs, elaborately carved or made of papier-maché, wicker chairs, twisted in fanciful arabesques, broken columns, imitation rocks and marble balustrades . . . towering mountains, a library, a castle, an immense spider-web, a garden gate, the “sad sea waves,” peaceful meadows, a staircase, a base of some massive columns, or simply dark clouds grouped around a light circular spot.19 Street photography symbolized freedom and individuality, qualities Genthe considered quintessentially American. Chinatown streets were especially conducive to the photographic rebellion promoted in this article because the spontaneity of the street enlivened the subjects of his studio portraiture (despite his marked preference for the former space).20 Along with the work of other less well-known aspiring flaneur photographers operating in San Francisco at the time and who sought inspiration in the exotic spaces of Chinatown, such as L. J. Stellman, Isaiah Taber, and Mervyn Silberstein, Genthe’s photographs can be seen as an emphatic rejection of bourgeois portraiture’s stifling conventions and anticipatory refusal of its repressive function—in ways that nevertheless ended up affirming precisely these features. Pictorialism’s reaction formation to bourgeois portraiture’s strictures is also inspired by the figure of the foreigner, and this shifting between street and studio symbolically delineates the spatial parameters of the foreigner and native, citizen and noncitizen. Nowhere is the trope of encounter, with its paradox of identification and disavowal better illustrated than in An Unsuspecting Victim (Figure 1.2). The initial title, referring to the uncropped image, is called Self-Portrait with Camera in Chinatown (Figure 1.3). The original version appears overexposed, with the Chinese background figures in flat gray tones. Only Genthe, who is clearly

Figure 1.2  An Unsuspecting Victim, cropped. (Photo by Arnold Genthe. LC-G403-0205-A, Library of Congress.)

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Figure 1.3  Self-Portrait with Camera in Chinatown. (Photo by Arnold Genthe. LC-G4030205-B, Library of Congress.)

in the foreground fussing with his camera and clutching it as though it were a prop, appears crisply defined. Already spectrally washed out in the original, the Caucasian men who will be etched or cropped out of the final print are discernible in the retouched version only after very close scrutiny. The figure on Genthe’s left has been cropped out of the frame, with only the faint edges of his cap and shoe intruding into the scene, hardly enough to disturb its symmetry. The figure who has been etched out, meanwhile, lingers, his indistinguishable body now a part of the shadows and uneven blending of light that blurs the negative space on Genthe’s immediate right. Retouching for Genthe was, literally, a process of elimination,21 through which he simplified the composition and made explicit what had only been originally implicit: the foregrounding of the photographer, who stands in the final version apart from those to whom he appears wholly indifferent. This ostensible indifference is belied by the pains he took to erase and cut and by the sheer volume of pictures he would continue to take of similar subjects.

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Although we cannot be certain to whom the caption refers, an assistant likely left an unseen touch. To my knowledge, Genthe left no notes about how it was shot or, for that matter, who shot it. Clearly, however, the photographer seems to position himself as the unsuspecting victim, caught on film by the very instrument with which he is playing. The two remaining figures that flank his left and right sides function as props—human counterparts, perhaps, to the furniture conventionalized in studio portraits. In a composition that depends so much on erasure, the inclusion of these two Chinese subjects is suggestive. The story that the picture tells is the relationship between Chinese child and Chinese bachelor, the former being the object of Genthe’s intent regard, and the latter only indirectly engaged by him. Genthe himself stands in front and seemingly detached from this developmental drama, between the youth on his left side and the mature man on his right. Yet, as we know from his memoir, it is in terms of this drama that he considered his psychic and aesthetic relationship to photography. In this context, then, Genthe’s “unposed” pose of indifference disavows the attachment that the careful, meticulous composition affirms: an intense interest in the child who stands, from this critical perspective, apart from both men. Genthe’s spatial prominence, which makes the Chinese man’s stooped posture and darker clothing even more obscured, would suggest the anonymous bachelor’s fundamental alienation from the two, Chinese child and white photographer. Yet standing near the anonymous laborer, he suggests an implicit sympathy with the latter bachelor,22 a status of masculine freedom that Genthe exalts in his memoir. We thus have a shadow effect: this bachelor who stoops in comparative darkness behind him, where his shadow would fall, is Genthe’s uncanny double. They are linked by their bachelorhood and their seeming indifference to the child—the child’s gaze is, significantly, the only one that directly engages the spectator, announcing that he is the actual focus of the artist’s regard. Indeed, this doubling paradoxically highlights a fundamental difference between the two figures: forced bachelorhood versus chosen bachelorhood, old Chinese man versus younger white man. Such striking similarities and irrevocable contrasts hint at a narrative of progression from youth to maturity, with Genthe usurping the role of the father to the Chinese child, whose “grandfather” appears to be on the other side. Yet, having assumed the symbolic paternal position, Genthe remains less interested in the actual male child (to whom he seems indifferent) than he is in the true child: the camera. Bringing studio conventions—of symmetry and, oddly, “family”—to street scenes, An Unsuspecting Victim also underscores how masculine Chinatown was and the unfamilial, perhaps even queer, terms that marked its triangulated relationships. The outright absence of female figures in Genthe’s outdoor “portrait” of masculinity suggests how the bachelors’ ambivalent

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relationship to the child answers what we will shortly see is the Chinese American family photograph’s chief claim, cohesiveness. Not even there in the first place (although certainly a subject, and, as I will shortly show, perhaps the favored subject of Genthe’s photographic fascination), to be cropped or etched out, the Chinese woman is a figure tacitly saved for another story. While Genthe may have advocated freedom from the triteness of studio portraiture, this freedom seemed most appropriate for the bachelors of the street with whom he sympathized. When Genthe turned his camera to Chinese women, he subtly retreated back into the studio, where they were most often pictured. Perhaps no photo better illustrates the gendered separation of these spheres of influence, street and domestic (i.e. studio) spaces, than a picture titled Dressed for the Feast (Figure 1.4), which depicts two finely dressed Chinese women entering the darkness of a large, opened door. Despite being captured on the streets of Chinatown in Genthe’s photos, Chinese women clearly belonged inside, and the dark space beyond the door frame of Dressed for the Feast showed what the camera failed to see from the street perspective: the view inside. Although Chinese women did in fact walk the streets and were photographed by Genthe doing so, when we consider the Chinatown portfolio as a whole, their proper place was clearly off these streets. In this sense, “street walking” for such women, despite being deemed appropriate on rare occasions, was an illegitimate activity according to the Old Chinatown volume. Genthe’s preference for portraying Chinese women in the studio suggests a profound shift in his earlier definition of rebellion. Although he was unexceptional in this regard—contemporary conventions consigned women to interior spaces—these photos illustrate how such conventions were especially targeted at Asian women, whose sexuality, as the exclusion laws made clear, was construed as a threat. Implicitly redeeming the studio space that he elsewhere disparaged, Genthe’s photographs of Chinese girls and women would, in a sense, contribute to missionary efforts to redeem their virtue. In visually bringing such subjects off the streets, Genthe symbolically accomplished in photography what his friend Donaldina Cameron would do as a missionary: “rescue” the girls from the more sordid aspects of “street walking,” prostitution,23 and slavery. Caucasian prostitutes, as Lucie Cheng Hirata has argued, were treated in a noticeably different way.24 At the turn of the last century, reform efforts were fundamentally racialized, although not all prostitutes were Asian women. Women generally were confined to domestic spaces, and in this respect Cameron’s own presence on the street was exceptional. Her role in the redemption of other women and in the preservation of Protestant virtue entailed being granted the right to roam the very streets she deemed so dangerous to less

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Figure 1.4  Dressed for the Feast. (Photo by Arnold Genthe. LCG403-0115, Library of Congress.)

stalwart souls. To that end, this form of street walking, as Peggy Pascoe persuasively argues, was a means of acquiring “female moral authority,” a measure of independence and power associated with the men, and, one might add, with the male flaneur.25 Genthe, in fact, wrote approvingly of the Mission House and Cameron’s charges, suggesting further that he helped with their education by introducing them to the western arts.26 Called “Lo Mo,” a familiar Cantonese phrase for old mother (in contrast to the more honorific “Mo Chun”)27 by her charges, Cameron could be seen as the female counterpart to Genthe. Complementing Cameron’s maternal yet spinsterly solicitude was Genthe’s bachelor paternalism. (Despite two engagements, Cameron, like Genthe, remained unmarried throughout her life.) By assuming a maternal role toward the girls and women whom she rescued from the streets,28 Cameron, like Genthe, served as a surrogate parent of sorts in this domestic tale. In Friends (Figure 1.5), Genthe thus offers yet another portrait of the artist, with his “creation,” Minnie Tong (affectionately called Tea Rose), a picture that serves as a companion to his other self-portrait with child, An Unsuspecting Victim. In Friends, the child looks directly into the camera, and although the photographer does not here acknowledge the camera (as he

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Figure 1.5  Friends (also titled Tea Rose ). (Photo by Arnold Genthe. LCG4085–0171, Library of Congress.)

does in An Unsuspecting Victim), he intently contemplates the Chinese child. The terms of this relationship were also domestically coded. Rescued from the streets, the girls were then educated to be not just Christians but also Victorian “angels of the home,” in effect integrating them to conventions while nonetheless denying full participation in the roles otherwise accompanying them. His studio portraits of Chinese girls were, after all, not just random shots but rather depictions of those who had been rescued from the streets, the slaves and prostitutes who were the targets of Christian reform. Although this sentimental education was typical for the time, the style of the Mission House under Cameron’s careful tutelage was unusual. Consider another well-known site of reform, the interracial Hampton Institute, which trained its charges for domestic service. An integral part of this training involved physical makeovers, as Laura Wexler has convincingly shown.29 The photos illustrating such projects are marked by their conventionalized “before and after” framing, so that the successful reform of such charges was revealed by their changed dress. When the girls and boys donned the sartorial markers of civilization (e.g. starched dresses and ironed shirts and breeches), they showed the camera that they had internalized their domestic re-education. Unlike the Native and African American children of the Hampton institute, whose plain woolen dress signified their transformation, however, the Mission House’s Chinese girls wore distinctively Chinese costumes as evidence of their

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domestic reform. And whereas typical institutional photographs were a study in contrast of “before” versus “after,” the photos we have by Genthe focused more on “after.” Yet when Genthe turned his camera on the girls, the most striking feature of his remarkable pictures was their dress. Subject to the domesticating efforts of the Home, Genthe’s girls (under Cameron’s careful ministrations) dress for the camera not just in clothing, but rather in costume. The distinction between clothing and costume attests to portraiture’s heightened sense of contrivance. Joan Severa, for instance, emphasized how posing for a picture was a theater of selfhood, so that dressing for the camera was inherently self-conscious.30 To be costumed for the camera suggests an even greater degree of awareness, though it is less clear whose self (that of the Chinese girl or of Genthe?) is highlighted in the Chinatown portfolio. And although Genthe posed for the camera, his efforts do not constitute as elaborate a codifying system as that of his girls. At stake in this codification, then, is the context that exceeds the visual frame, that which engages the girls in a project of sentimental reform and enables reentry, as domestic subjects, in the social world. But these civilizing efforts stop far short of citizenship. Thus, the differential dress (clothing versus costume) marks an important distinction between civility and citizenship that even such reform projects as Cameron’s Mission House—which claimed to have rescued more than 1,500 girls from servitude31—could not overcome. Rather, the opposite was sometimes true. If Cameron could determine that a prospective immigrant (wives of merchants were the only Chinese women able to enter the United States legally) was in fact smuggled into the country, she could ensure that woman’s deportation. The reform effort thus not only was unable to grant citizenship, instead offering “civility” as substitute for citizenship, but it also involved denial of entry as well as deportation. By campaigning against the traffic in Chinese women, the civilizing mission of which Cameron was a prominent figurehead and Genthe’s photos implicitly affirmed, reinforced the prevailing, restrictive discourse of exclusion. Switching, then, between street and studio, Genthe’s photography registered and reinforced the alternating narratives of confinement and limited freedom associated with the Chinese women of Chinatown. Distinguished by their gendered spatial divisions, Genthe’s Chinatown portfolio thus served a dual function. Because Genthe was himself an immigrant, his interracial identification with the Chinese bachelors whom he depicted crowding the streets of Chinatown romanticized the freedom he associated with the urban setting, against the strictures of convention that he disdained in the studio. On the streets of Chinatown, by contrast, he wandered the dark alleys and narrow walkways that the bachelor-husbands did, envisioning freedom through photography. Drawn to the streets in his pursuit of his “fellow” bachelors, the

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Chinese men, Genthe provided a split view of Chinese women, depicting them both on the streets and, in a return to more conventional settings, in the studio. In the context of Cameron’s Mission House, freedom can best be understood within the domestic constraints that were opposed to the values cherished by these well-meaning reformers and that the bachelors and girls of Chinatown did not experience in the same way. Accordingly, in Genthe’s writing and photography, the encounter was a dual experience: on the one hand, his encounter with the spectacle of foreignness and, on the other hand, that of his subjects with the camera itself. Not only did Genthe portray himself as an adventurer in Chinatown; he did so by bringing together detection and photography in the ethnic enclave, preferring to use a small, black rectangular detective camera with a fast Zeiss lens (the better to capture rapid movement).32 Although the relationship between picture taking and detecting is, as Tom Gunning notes, often occluded, Genthe explicitly links the two activities, so that his mystification of Chinatown depended on his mystification of photography: I had learned that the inhabitants of Chinatown had a deep-seated superstition about having their pictures taken. To them the camera was a “black devil box” in which all the evils of the earth were bottled up, ready to pounce upon them. Not only did the grown people run from it, but the older boys and girls had been trained to gather up their little sisters and brothers at the sight of one and to run into cellars or up the stairways.33 (Another of Genthe’s photographs, titled Fleeing from the Camera and depicting a child attempting to escape the invasive reach of his lens, captures this photo-shyness.) His Chinatown photographs simultaneously exposed and concealed their compositional subjects, reflecting the desire of the photographer and the viewing public to see, and their attendant desire not to see, such inscrutable subjects. Genthe’s studio and street photography helped establish the symbolic legitimacy of the citizen-subject through the representation of noncitizens. Chinatown denizens and Chinese American photographers may have seen such spaces differently, however. As Anthony Lee argues in his history of visual representations of Chinatown, the Pictorialists were hardly the first to encounter and record the Chinese in America.34 Historian John Kuo Wei Tchen similarly observes that by the 1890s, most, if not all, of the Chinese in the United States had already come into contact with cameras and photographers. . . .

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Photographs had become so much an integral part of everyday life in California that it is difficult to believe that the Chinese and Chinatown were totally cut off from and oblivious to them as Genthe would have us believe.35 As Elaine Kim notes in her review of Asian American art, by the end of the nineteenth century the Chinese on the Pacific coast were photographing themselves.36 According to Peter Palmquist, Chinese and Japanese encounters with photography on the West Coast began even earlier. As poorly paid assistants who lent able hands in commercial studios that popped up in the boomtown businesses that followed the gold rush, Asian laborers quickly learned the trade and by the 1860s had set up shop themselves—with one “Ka Chau” credited as the first Chinese to open a daguerreian gallery in San Francisco.37 In this context, Genthe’s title for the photo of the two girls, Their First Photograph, is deeply ironic as it marks the photographer’s, rather than his subjects,’ introduction to the craft. At around the same time that Genthe arrived in San Francisco, amateur photographer Mary Tape was also documenting Chinatown’s streets.38 Known for her fierce defense of her daughter’s right to equal education, Mary Tape is celebrated as a civil rights pioneer. In the landmark case Tape v. Hurley (1885), Mary Tape sued the superintendent of the San Francisco Board of Education on behalf of her daughter, insisting that Mamie had the right, by residency and by virtue of citizenship (an earlier decision had confirmed that Chinese born in the United States indeed held citizenship), to attend Spring Valley School with other Caucasian students.39 Although in 1885 the California Supreme Court upheld Superior Court Justice McGuire’s decision in favor of Tape— he had written that “to deny a child, born of Chinese parents in this state, entrance to the public schools would be a violation of the law of the state and the Constitution of the United States”40 —the school board found a way to adhere to the letter to the law while violating its spirit. They authorized the opening of Chinese schools for the education of “Mongolian” children, effectively initiating the practice of segregation a full decade before the notorious principle of “separate but equal” would be legally formalized with the Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896).41 Despite failing in her efforts to secure a place for Mamie within an integrated school system, Tape carried on her battle rhetorically. Outraged by this policy, in a letter published in Alta, Tape rebuked the board for its racism, its uncivil treatment of her daughter. In addition to expressing the wish that the board’s supervisor “never be persecuted like the way [he had] persecuted” her daughter, Tape continued, in her broken English, to insist on the principle of equality. She challenged the board to “see if [Mamie] . . . is not same as other

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Caucasians, except in features. It seems no matter how a Chinese may live and dress so long as you know they Chinese. Then they are hated as one. There is not any right or justice for them.”42 The intertwined principles of integration and equality, which for Tape were the inextricable civil rights that attended citizenship, were also symbolically evident in the amateur photographs she took of her children on the streets of San Francisco. Although only a few prints from the 1890s still survive, they provide a noticeable contrast to the Pictorialists’ signature theme of exotic otherness. Indeed, in the wake of the board’s triumph, Mamie was enrolled in this separate school, and a photograph circa 1890 taken by Isaiah Taber depicts her among her schoolmates—all of whom pose for the camera in Chinese dress. In contrast, Mamie’s depiction of her children, who are shown wearing clothing and not costume in these street portraits, underscores the point she emphasized in her letter to the board: her children dress as Americans do; they play with Americans; they should be afforded equal rights to education that other American children enjoy. Instead of portraying streets impenetrable to Caucasian residents of San Francisco, occupied exclusively by Chinese denizens and the sole intrepid photographer adventurous enough to enter this apparently forbidden space, Mary Tape’s street photographs suggest the possibility of integration. In one of them, Mamie is shown with her sister Gertrude and an unidentified white friend (Figure 1.6). In others, the children are shown with other playmates, some Caucasian and some also Chinese (Figure 1.7), illustrating the diversity of the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area. That Mamie’s back is turned in Figure 1.6 is unusual for this period, at least in comparison with the commercial photographs of children on the streets of Chinatown. Given the skill evident in Tape’s other photographs, however, it is unlikely that this pose marks her inexperience. Rather, juxtaposed against other photographs of Chinese children, Mamie’s pose reveals just how exposed these children were by the keen regard of Tape’s counterparts, the Pictorialists. Mamie’s disregard of the camera is arguably a sign of her unaffected intimacy with its operator, as well as the operator’s willingness to encounter her subjects—rather than set upon and symbolically conquer them. In addition to Tape’s amateur photography, notable early prints by three establishments—Shew’s Pioneer Gallery, 523 Kearny Street; Fong Get Photo Studio, 914 Stockton; and the W. F. Song Studio, 800 Washington Street— suggest a thriving Chinese American commercial practice in the nineteenth century. While some of these prints are not dated, one such portrait, of a certain “Chay Yune,” attributed to Shew’s Pioneer Gallery, is dated July 31, 186643 —several years before the Golden Spike ceremony at Promontory Point. Although this body of work is far from extensive,44 the prominence of the

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Figure 1.6  Untitled photograph of the Figure 1.7  Untitled photograph of Gertrude Tape children, Mamie (right) and Gertrude Tape and friend. (Photo by Mary Tape, c. 1890s. (left). (Photo by Mary Tape, c. 1890s. CourCourtesy of Alisa Kim, Jack G. Kim Collection.) tesy of Alisa Kim, Jack G. Kim Collection.)

studio setting and frontal portraiture offers an implicit corrective to the Pictorialists’ exotic portrayal of Chinatown’s denizens.45 Despite the fact that the portraits of Chinese women in the works of Chinese American commercial photographers appear to confirm the gendered interior setting and the costuming approach that are Pictorialist staples, suggesting, as Pegler-Gordon insightfully points out, “a visual adherence to traditional respectability,”46 the elaborate backdrops, lavish dress, and careful poses also attest to careful self-portraiture, which emphasizes bourgeois presentability (Figure 1.8). A mixture of Chinese conventions of portraiture, in which frontal poses and direct gazes are common,47 and a Euro-American style, these photographs not only incorporated indirect gazes, but their subjects, PeglerGordon points out, also departed entirely from the former by displaying parts of the body that would usually have been concealed for modesty’s sake: bound feet and slender hands. Through this corporeal display, the Chinese women can be seen to play, on the one hand, to the fascination clearly evident in Pictorialist photographs with signs of their exotic difference. On the other hand, as Pegler-Gordon convincingly argues, the bound feet were also markers of their respectability, at least for immigration officials. Additionally, the hands displayed wedding rings—not customarily worn by Chinese women—in anticipation of the exclusionist gaze that, anxious to detect the difference between wife and prostitute, would have scrutinized such portraits (often appended to the travel documents of Chinese women) for visual signs of immodesty.

Figure 1.8  Girl in Fancy Dress. (Shew’s Pioneer Gallery. Courtesy of California Historical Society, de Young Collection, FN-34358/CHS2011.601.)

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Paradoxically, although by the standards of Chinese portraiture, the exposure of women’s hands would have been seen as improper, the display of wedding rings worn by these hands rescripted these portraits as a blend of Chinese and American styles, to resignify these bodies as proper and modest. To contest this principle of exclusion, Chinese American photographers thus turned to precisely the conventions that Genthe disdained: studio portraiture. Perhaps the most provocative portrait was made by a commercial photographer working in a Chinatown located in Hawaii. It is credited to On Char, a prolific contemporaneous photographer whose studio in Honolulu produced an extensive and important collection of images for this community.48 One of the most successful commercial photographers in Hawaii, On Char was born in Kohala in 1889, the son of Car Loy Sui and Char Ng Shee, who immigrated from Guangdong province in China to work on the sugar plantations. Though in 1899 On Char was sent to Honolulu to apprentice with a grocer, a few years later he ended up instead as an apprentice to photographer Roscoe Perkins. He eventually picked up the trade in 1904–1907, after a humble start sweeping and cleaning in the studio, by helping with camera operation and photofinishing. His own business, City Photo Studio, established shortly after completion of his apprenticeship, was located in downtown Honolulu. It did a brisk trade among the local ethnic community and competed well with Japanese American photographers who had also set up shop. On Char’s studio produced tens of thousands of portraits, some of which were to be appended to passport documents but even more of which depicted families whose members were often scattered across the Pacific.49 One family portrait, made from two separate photographs, is especially revealing (Figures 1.9 and 1.10). Although on the basis of the style of dress the picture dates to the early twentieth century, it nonetheless provides an illuminating corrective to Genthe’s depiction of Chinatown. Illustrating perhaps the most common scene in studio portraiture, domestic order, the final photograph emphasizes the symmetrical relationship between husband/father, shown on the left, and wife/mother and child, on the right. The props familiar to domestic photographs, such as tables and chairs, contribute to this sense of symmetry, a symmetry that, more importantly, functions to achieve a formal and ideological unity. As Wing Tek Lum and Gregory Yee Mark astutely observe, the two versions of the photograph suggest that great pains were taken to achieve the formal symmetry that attests to the unity of family.50 Cropped and then carefully fused together, the image belies the actual distance between husband, who was a laborer in Hawaii and photographed there, and wife and son, who lived in China, where they were photographed. Only the woman’s feet, which are impossibly suspended in midair, expose the contrivance. A fetishized

Figure 1.9  Untitled photograph of Chinese man in Western clothing, ordered by Lum Choy; Hawaii. (On Char Collection, SCP_65825, Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii.)

Figure 1.10  Untitled photograph of Chinese man in Western clothing, with woman and child retouched into photograph, ordered by Lum Choy; Hawaii. (On Char Collection, SCP_65826, Bishop Museum.)

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synecdoche of Chinese womanhood,51 the feet in this photograph make the presence of wife and mother assume a ghostly resonance. Their importance here is a reminder of how significant feet would be for potentially legitimizing the bodies of Chinese women who sought entry to the United States. The anxiety occasioned by the absence of mother and child necessitates technological contrivance, but their appearance in the picture is nonetheless ironic testimony to absence. By craftily compensating for enormous gaps in space and time, the picture symbolically unifies the family through the conventions of studio portraiture. In the twentieth century, Chinese American commercial photography continued to flourish. In a speech to the Chinese Historical Society, one such photographer, Kem Lee, reflects that when he began his practice in the mid1920s shortly after arriving in the United States, his shop on Jackson Street near Stockton largely filled the demand for identity photographs: “Among the Chinese there was always a need for ID pictures: to be used in Certificates of Identity and other travel documents.”52 In such photographs, Chinese Americans fashioned their bodies while at the same time attempting to conform to the standards that the state was setting, to make such bodies legible. Even though the props in portraits by On Char and by other contemporaneous Chinese American commercial photographers can be seen as a repetitive and distinct feature of the studios themselves (for example, the oversized Chinese furniture, footstools, and ceramic side table are reused in portraits produced by Shew’s Pioneer Gallery), it is on the basis of the trite and conventional—in short everything that Genthe disdained about this practice of photography— that these photographs’ implicit claims about their subjects’ legitimacy is made evident. The respectability of its subjects is predicated on precisely the triteness of studio photography, and honorific portraits were an important way of mediating the strictures of tightening immigration laws.

Likeness and Liking in the Picture Bride Practice Studio portraits remained a crucial way of negotiating the restrictions imposed by these laws, whose scope broadened to include not only prospective immigrants from China but also those from Japan. In 1907, the exchange of diplomatic notes—precipitated partially by outrage about the “Mongolian” segregated school system that Mary Tape so vocally opposed53 and to which Japanese children were then also restricted—resulted in the Gentlemen’s Agreement. As a means of preserving “face”54 by avoiding the potential humiliation of public restrictions on immigration, Japan settled on a compromise with the United States. Although a gentlemen’s agreement typically shadows the law insofar as its terms, often sealed through the civil and informal gesture

Spectacles of Intimacy and the Aesthetics of Domestication  47

of a handshake rather than through the authorizing agency of a signature, are legally unenforceable, as an executive agreement this compromise between the United States and Japan had the binding force of law.55 Moreover, it nevertheless had a similar effect to that of already established exclusion laws aimed against Chinese immigrants—with the important difference of not being officially and humiliatingly named as such—of drastically reducing the Japanese American community. Under the terms of this agreement, immigration from Japan and Korea (which was then occupied by Japan) was restricted to immediate family members joining with those who were already in the United States.56 The practice of proxy marriages,57 which was often facilitated through the exchange of photographs, served as a means of circumventing this ­exclusion. Between 1908 and 1920, an estimated 20,000 Japanese and Korean picture brides entered the United States under the auspices of the Gentlemen’s Agreement, “reuniting” with husbands whom many had yet to meet but to whom they were nonetheless wed through picture marriages.58 Picture marriages that resulted in unions in Hawaii involved a complex circuit of exchange. Typically men sent to their families in Japan and Korea self-portraits, often posed in Western dress, where Western, as might be expected, was to signify not only modernity but also prosperity (Figure 1.11). The photograph was then sent to go-betweens who were charged with establishing a suitable union. In the process, the prospective groom also received his potential mate’s photograph. Once necessary arrangements were made, the bride’s name was entered into the groom’s family register, at which point, the marriage was considered legal. After three to six months, the bride then went on her way to join her husband abroad.59 Legible in Japan as a sign of progress, the picture marriage was construed by the Japanese community in the United States as nothing less than a means of moral not to mention social survival.60 The arrival of the picture brides within this community would balance the ratio between the sexes; marriage, community advocates hoped, would ensure dedication to its renewal. Significantly, one of the methods implemented to ease the transition of brides to the United States were lessons in deportment. In his fragmentary history of the Gentlemen’s Agreement, Jordan Sand notes that the emigration society of Yokohama offered picture brides “thirty-five hours of free instruction in American domestic management, hygiene, and etiquette.”61 Just as important, visual culture facilitated the picture bride practice in important ways. These portraits were the chief means of introducing men and women who had not yet met, and for this reason the quality of “likeness” was an important feature. Although the term, which denotes the perception that an accurate representation of a face (usually in profile) could capture human character, is sometimes conflated with photography, as in a “photographic likeness,” the principle of resemblance on which it drew was in fact an extension

Figure 1.11  Fumi Toshima’s immigration records. (Case file 14676/16-3, INS-SF. RG 85, National Archives, San Francisco.)

Spectacles of Intimacy and the Aesthetics of Domestication  49

of eighteenth-century portrait painting. As John Gage explains, “‘likeness’ was seen as one of the most important tasks of portrait art,”62 so that the faithfulness of a work’s representation threatened to trump its artfulness. With the advent of photography’s mechanized processes of imitation and its vaunted naturalism, the concern with likeness, and the accompanying belief that the portrait could disclose an authentic truth about the person it represented, was energetically renewed. Indeed, this belief seemed to sustain the proxy marriage practice, since photographic portraits were often a primary way for brides and grooms to judge the qualities of their prospective matches—and a way for inspectors to check the identities of landing immigrants. The process was by no means smooth, however, and perhaps the clearest sign of potential trouble lay in on the surface of the portraits themselves: many of these photos were enhanced or touched up. Indeed, in oral histories, some picture brides recalled their disappointment at seeing their mates for the first time—men did not always live up to their photographs, looking older, darker, and poorer in person than their likenesses suggested.63 J. S. Kishiyama describes “what you call a photograph marriage” thus: “Some guy played dirty and sent a young picture from Japan, and wife say, ‘This is not you, this picture is too young for you. I didn’t know you were so old.”64 By manipulating their likenesses, these men sought to encourage the liking that would encourage consent to proxy marriages. This tension between likeness and liking vexed the picture bride practice, troubling both those who participated in these marriages and those who opposed the practice. Although picture marriages were a herald of modernity in Japan, among anti-Japanese agitators they were a barbarous custom. As Kei Tanaka observes, “Officers of immigration stations on the Pacific Coast and the Department of Commerce and Labor . . . shared the common perception that picture marriage was the Japanese way of importing young women for ‘immoral purposes’ and it allowed child marriage, bigamy, fornication, and incest. Extending these discourses on Japanese picture marriage, the officers unofficially defined Japanese marriage and divorce as lax in both formality and morality, deviating far from principles of western civilization.”65 Anti-Japanese agitators protested the practice of proxy marriages under the banner of moral improvement. For them this entailed rejecting such marriages as sham arrangements, offensive to what they maintained was the standard of authentic feeling appropriate to love matches. To bolster these claims, local newspapers occasionally ran sensational stories, with lurid bylines such as “She Dares Love Man Other Than Her Husband” and “Lover Rescues ‘Picture Bride,’” detailing the rages of jealous husbands and the infidelities of wayward wives.66 As General Sherill, formerly a minister to Argentina, remarked in an address to the America-Japan society in

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Tokyo, upholding a proper standard of decorum required further measures. He urged that a “Ladies’ Agreement” supplement its predecessor: All you can see in this “picture bride system” is a proper desire of your men abroad to get wives from home. You are accustomed to marriages being arranged by parents or friends and therefore cannot grasp how the “picture bride system” surprises and jars upon our people. It isn’t a question of right or wrong, but an affront to a long prevailing custom of our country, where we are as greatly attached to free matrimonial choice as you are to reverence for your ancestors. Neither of us understands how strongly the other feels in these regards.67 For anti-Japanese agitators and suspicious immigration officials alike, the practice of proxy marriages was simply uncivilized. Debates on marriage customs thus were focused on the intimacy between husbands and wives, whose affective attachment toward each other became the object of increasingly intense scrutiny. A few years after this practice was abolished, C. K. Hachy wrote to the New York Times, condemning the hypocrisy of moralizing attacks against picture brides: “They called these girls heathens and said they were menacing the American ideal of marriage because they wanted to attack anything Japanese as well as these Japanese girls.”68 In effect, this opposition to the picture bride practice, which Hachy defended, sought to redefine marriage as a harmonious—and civil—union of likeness and liking. Accordingly, the test for legitimacy for these anti-Japanese agitators hinged on two features: the fidelity of the portrait to represent the person it ostensibly depicted and the affection between partners. Since the latter was nearly impossible to prove, the former became the principal method for inspectors to ensure that those who entered the United States were qualified to do so. As brides entered immigration stations such as Angel Island, awaiting agitators sought to photograph their arrival en masse, as a means of further erasing any trace of sentiment from the scene. Published in newspapers, the photographs depicted the brides as a mass of needy bodies that portended disorder. Indeed, as a way of handling such objections, quick civil ceremonies were often, as noted earlier, conducted soon after the brides’ arrival. In this dual manner, the images of prospective immigrants were made legible for the state. The visual codes of self-representation that tendered a form of liking as the basis for selection were thus recoded, as the pictures became incorporated within a system of surveillance (Figure 1.11). As a demonstration of Allan Sekula’s astute observation that the development of honorific portraiture coincides with instrumental imaging practices and increasingly bureaucratizing state of surveillance,69 these pictures became incorporated within official immigration documents.

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Not only were the picture brides’ self-portraits redefined through their official processing; they were, in a sense, also rephotographed: appended within the documents that marked their passage, the self-portraits often functioned as identifying evidence. Conversely, state surveillance measures to render the portraits legible were only partially successful. For although their adoption serves as an affirmation of faith in portraiture’s ability to convey the likeness of its subject, the photographs had already served their purposes of ensuring a transnational mobility. In San Francisco, the presence of Dr. C. B. Haworth at the immigration processing station, whose responsibility was to ensure, according to The Washington Post, that “the exchange of photographs is made correctly and that each man gets his own wife,” indirectly acknowledge the possibility for mistaking likenesses.70 Moreover, the honorific portraits exchanged between men and women suggest that their subjects actively participated in subtle methods of selffashioning that addressed not just the informal requirements of state surveillance but also the implicit expectations of proxy marriages. Although the two functions of honorific portraiture sometimes overlapped, they are nevertheless distinct. Drawing on and reworking the conventions of portraiture, such as symbolic props, stylized poses, and artful backdrops, the subjects of these portraits sought to draw attention to their status and respectability. Tanaka argues that for the men, this usually meant crafting an image of modernity and prosperity through the adoption of Western dress. Unlike the frontal pose common in portraits of Chinese merchants, these Japanese men conceded to the Euro-American convention of posing slightly off-center. By contrast, Tanaka observes, prospective brides focused more on representing modesty instead of modernity. To do so, they were portrayed in Japanese kimono, and often posed with the symbolic national flower, the chrysanthemum. Although this sense of an apparently traditional decorum was the favored means of self-representation, ironically, the brides’ sartorial selection was one of the first features to change when the women arrived in the United States. After their boat landed, not only were these proxy marriages resolemnized, as noted earlier, through a quick civil ceremony, but many brides were also immediately taken to a shop where they were outfitted with Western clothes. It seemed that only after visually illustrating their modesty could they be transformed into modern, American women. Evidence that these brides anticipated and sought to meet the gaze of the U.S. state can also be found in some of the other props with which they posed. In addition to the conventional chrysanthemum, some portraits featured stacks of books, an acknowledgment perhaps of the increasing importance of literacy as a requirement for immigration. Luibhéid observes that although this requirement was not formalized until the passage of the Immigration Act

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Figure 1.12  Detail from Fumi Toshima’s immigration records. (Case file

Figure 1.13  Detail from Fumi Akashi’s immigration records. (Case file 14676/

14676/16-3, INS-SF. RG 85, National Archives, San Francisco.)

9-16, INS-SF. RG 85, National Archives, San Francisco.)

of 1917, restrictionists had been calling for it since the 1890s. Because literacy had excited controversy for more than a decade, picture brides were likely to have been aware that a question about this skill was standard in interviews with inspectors. For example, Fumi Toshima, who landed on the SS Chiyo Maru and married Eikichi Toshima, posed with flowers and books, symbols of femininity and literacy (Figure 1.12). Likewise, Fumi Akashi, who landed on the same boat and married Kentaro Akashi, not only holds a fan but also stands among books (Figure 1.13) as visual corroboration for her claim to literacy. That these women arrived in 1915, well before literacy became an official requirement, illustrates their portraits’ double address. The photographs solicited the attention of grooms and anticipated the scrutiny of inspectors. Through these varied photographic practices, then, in which the affinities and disconnections between likeness and liking served as the basis for tendering attachments and for refuting the legitimacy of these attachments, the genteel terms of the Gentlemen’s Agreement paradoxically became the basis for countering the gray areas of immigration law. The impossibility of accurately discerning affect and determining identity—the ambiguities of liking and likeness—meant that for the families constituted by means of this agreement,

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this contest could be successful. Although the immigration of male laborers was halted, the increase in women—who often themselves provided labor— undermined the agreement’s manifest purpose. Through strictures that framed grooms’ bodies in terms of the demands of “likeness” familiar to portraiture, which would elicit, in turn, “liking,” they and, especially, the brides they had selected would defy the state that expressly sought, through legal measures, to govern such bodies. Less than a decade after the picture bride practice facilitated the arrival of Japanese and Korean women in the United States, it was clear that this agreement had only partially succeeded and largely failed in its intent to limit immigration, and, in 1920, the passage of the Ladies’ Agreement effectively halted the picture bride practice. From Pictorialist portrayals that straddle art and ethnography, to family photographs, to self-portraits, the national album encompasses a rich variety of photographs, including not only the obvious instrumental images but also those that served explicitly artistic and commercial purposes. If Genthe’s photographs helped constitute the citizen by figuring noncitizens as isolated and insular outsiders, On Char’s family photographs drew on the conventions of sentimental portraiture and their attendant civilizing domestic ideology in order to present the image of unity. This symbolic contest over citizenship often relied on photographic conventions and, as I have shown in my discussion of the picture bride practice, interventions that sought variously to fix (through the literal appending of the photograph to identifying documents) subjects through the agency of the state and to free subjects, enabling them to elude the state’s gaze in subtly coded ways. Before the rights of naturalization were conferred to Chinese and Japanese immigrants, the terms of social belonging often associated with political citizenship served as a prominent if still underdeveloped theme in photographs from the early twentieth century. The uncertain relationship between photographic “likeness” and affective “liking” became the focus for encoding and recoding, a process that pitted these subjects against the surveilling frame of the state and the strict terms with which citizenship was officially defined. By attending to the methods by which photographic visual culture helps establish affiliations and disaffiliations between these varied subject positions—the denizens of Chinatown and white photographer, citizen and noncitizen, hopeful Japanese bride and expectant groom—we can see how the making of photos may also be the making and, by implication, the unmaking of citizens. Juxtaposing Genthe’s Chinatown album against practices of selfimaging that draw on, while revising, many of the conventions that informed this earlier work, photography served as a complex medium and discursive framework through which prospective immigrants, Caucasian and Asian alike, navigated the tricky terrain of U.S. citizenship.

2 Cultivating Citizenship Internment Landscapes and Still-Life Photography

S

ince the introduction of William Petersen’s concept of the model minority to Americans in 1966, this figure has, despite ongoing attempts to discredit its authenticity, swiftly become an enduring part of popular discourse. Even though the model minority myth has been the focus of numerous debates, few critics have noticed that Petersen took pains to illustrate what this figure looked like; his lengthy article was accompanied by photographs notable for their depiction of laboring Japanese American farmers. By calling on his fellow Americans to cast aside their prejudices and embrace the model minority—exemplary because of this uncomplaining productive industry—as full citizens, Petersen visually linked citizenship with cultivation. In so doing, this influential conceptualization of the model minority resurrected cultivation as a powerful discourse of civility, whose most recognizable articulation can be traced to the internment period and whose most provocative, if ambivalent, expression can be found in the visual documentation of this period, when the civil rights associated with citizenship were infamously suspended for those of Japanese descent who were decried as “enemy aliens.” As a contrast to Petersen’s celebratory treatment of cultivation, consider a 1942 photograph taken at Manzanar relocation camp and credited to Clem Albers, which spotlights a Japanese American man balanced on a treetop, pruning unruly branches while a military police (MP) officer stands guard below (Figure 2.1). Posed in the center of the frame, the MP’s stocky body obscures the base of the tree itself. Although the gardener is charged with cultivating this bleak landscape, it is arguably the guard who imposes an even more definitive sense of order—an authority further trumped by the

Figure 2.1  “Pruning trees at this War Relocation Authority Center, where 10,000 evacuees of Japanese ancestry are spending the duration, while an M.P. is standing guard in the background.” (Photo by Clem Albers, Manzanar Relocation Center, California. 210-GB-097, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.)

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surveilling camera eye that carefully composes this scene. Why should cultivation, a seemingly unthreatening form of labor, require surveillance? This chapter explores the significance of the discourse of cultivation— developed through reference to conventions of landscape and, to a lesser extent, of still life—for representing the internment and, in its subtle resurgence in the movement for redress, the internment’s enduring political aftermath. Cultivation, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is the tilling of the land, an act that can also entail “the developing, fostering, or improving (of the mind, faculties, etc.) by education and training; the condition of being cultivated; culture, refinement.” This connection between cultivation and civility is confirmed in Raymond Williams’s ruminations on the keyword culture, which he notes is in its early uses “a noun of process,” involving the “tending of natural growth” that is later associated with “human development.”1 At times used interchangeably with civility, culture is inextricably tied to the concept of cultivation. A close consideration of the archive of internment photographs reveals a remarkable concern, even at times reverence, for cultivation of the land that often found expression through reference to landscape conventions. Moreover, this concern persisted not only in widely circulated photographs taken by famous photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Francis Stewart, who documented the internment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), and by the celebrated Ansel Adams, a well-meaning civilian whose book Born Free and Equal, featuring his photographs of Manzanar, constitutes a liberal yet equivocal defense of Japanese American civil rights. It is also manifest in a wide range of less familiar photographs taken by internees themselves, such as Toyo Miyatake—who defiantly smuggled prohibited equipment into the Manzanar camp and subsequently recorded daily life there—as well as of internees who, surprisingly, were hired by the WRA to document camp activities. Though an increasing number of scholars who have reviewed this archive have drawn attention to the ideological significance of internment photographs, few have commented on their concern with cultivation, tending to focus instead on the political implications of tropes of normalcy. Jasmine Alinder, for example, shrewdly observes that the smile, a common expression on many of the internees who seemed to have little reason to smile, helped normalize the process of internment.2 In her assessment of the historic value of WRA photographs in the National Archives, Sylvia Danovitch likewise reflects on their “benign” features,3 but goes on to speculate that this visual record exonerates Americans of incivility. Unable to claim that the rights of citizenship were protected during the internment, but determined to show how humane its conduct was, Danovitch insists that though “we committed a grave error . . . we were civilized. The photographs are our witness.”4 Although the

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treatment of Japanese Americans was unjust, Danovitch argues that it was in the end humane. Through this appeal to a seemingly unimpeachable standard of civility, the state is exonerated. Civility is expressed not just in the smiles of the internees or in the depictions of the persistence of normal life, however. This discourse arguably finds its most evocative form within internment photography through appeals to landscape conventions, and sometimes its most devastating critique through still-life conventions. The idea that landscape, provisionally defined as the human relationship with the formal composition of space, an ordering of nature, should be internment photography’s privileged aesthetic is appropriate given the spatial focus of Executive Order 9066. Nowhere is this spatial focus more obvious than in the order’s central contradiction: although Hawaii’s vulnerability had been exposed by the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was the Pacific Coastal mainland, not the islands, that was designated a military zone. In constituting spaces of human confinement, or, according to the WRA, of “human conservation,”5 the camps highlight the inextricable link between the spatial and human dimensions of the evacuation, and many photographs of experiences there sought to reconcile the loss of citizenship rights by highlighting civility in an unusual way, through an engagement with the discourse of cultivation. The deployment of landscape conventions in internment photographs functions as a way of coming to terms with the contradictions of Executive Order 9066, which effectively stripped those of Japanese descent, regardless of citizenship status, of their constitutional rights.6 By drawing on the ideological implications of these conventions, many internment photographs naturalize and legitimize nationhood by offering, instead of the rights and privileges of citizenship denied to the internees, the compensation of civility. Civility is manifest on the level of form in the style of some of the photographs, and on the level of content in the emphasis on cultivation as a privileged mode of productive labor whereby the internees could prove they belonged to the nation that had rejected them. This concern with the land, as a primary basis for liberal justifications of the state of exception, did not end with the closure of the camps, however. The rhetoric of cultivation, an integral part of landscape ideology, not to mention of the civilizational logic of civility, surfaces as an implicit component of the redress movement. At the same time, invocations of this rhetoric within select images from this archive that drew on still life rather than landscape conventions arguably undermined the latter’s conciliatory function. Not only does landscape ideology help salve the crisis of citizenship constituted by the state of exception, but it also negotiates this crisis, alternately foreclosing and refashioning the scope of citizenship for Japanese Americans.

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The Lure of the Land During World War II, U.S. photography played a pivotal part in symbolic battles waged overseas and at home. Abroad, a phalanx of photographers produced pictures for propaganda and surveillance. On the home front, photography was no less important to the war effort. Eager to develop the theme of visual unification—part of a domestic effort to rally support for the military mission abroad—books such as Say, Is This the U.S.A. by Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White and This Is America by Eleanor Roosevelt and Francis MacGregor7 promoted national unity through American landscape photography and, in so doing, affirmed an ideological tradition established within American painting. As Angela Miller argues, the American landscape does not simply suggest a relationship with nature. Rather, it perpetuates “the nationalist myth—that the physical environment itself produced national character.”8 Within this context of national unity building, a project that draws extensively on landscape ideology,9 we need to consider some of the most striking images produced during this period: “internment photography,” the archive of images produced in the wake of Executive Order 9066 that authorized the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans. So significant is this archive that it constitutes part of the larger picture of unity elaborated by contemporary war photography; indeed, Elena Tajima Creef contends that it marks the introduction of Japanese Americans to visual culture in the United States.10 The bulk of these photographs were produced under the auspices of the WRA Photography Service initially for the purposes of issuing press releases and, later during the Resettlement period (1943–1945), when Japanese Americans were encouraged to move from the internment camps to areas outside designated military zones along the Pacific coast, for the purposes of promoting this policy.11 Still others were produced independently of the WRA, and, while their subjects and themes sometimes overlapped with those featured in the official record, together they helped shape a rich narrative of civility’s durability— even when the rights of citizenship were suspended. Regardless of who authorized the operator, many of the photographs included within this archive share a similar concern with addressing the issue of national unity by invoking the theme of cultivation. There were practical, material reasons for this preoccupation. Land and property, in the wake of Executive Order 9066, was up for grabs. Indeed, some of the most coveted, fertile land on the West Coast had been cultivated through the industry and skill of Japanese American farmers.12 Though these farmers received assurances that their property would be fairly disposed of, the relocation occurred with such haste that the process was haphazard at best. Even the assistance of the Farm Security Administration (FSA)—the

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organization for which Lange and Stewart first worked—failed to ensure the just transfer of property. Far from receiving fair market value for their land, farmers variously entrusted its care to well-meaning friends and neighbors, sold it for less than it was worth, or were plainly swindled. That cultivation of land was at stake in the internment is evident not just in the dispossession of Japanese Americans. This concern with cultivation also informed the selection of sites for relocation, which were chosen not just because of their remoteness but also because, despite their aridity, officials hoped that the Japanese American internees would make them cultivable. In fact, a WRA Quarterly Report refers to camps as “pioneer communities.”13 These reports go on to provide detailed assessments of the land’s arability with several goals in mind. Enrichment of the soil was an end in itself, which is why only public land was considered; if the soil were enriched, it would benefit national rather than private interests.14 Moreover, officials were eager for the camps to be self-sufficient in hopes of obviating criticism that Japanese Americans were escaping the deprivations of the war while other Americans suffered. Accordingly, all of the camps participated in so-called agricultural projects with this lofty objective in mind. A statement at a conference of agricultural employees held at the Gila River camp stated the projects’ goals plainly: “Good public relations demand that the residents in the WRA centers make a contribution to the war effort. The agricultural production program offers the only project employment to evacuees which is in direct contribution to the war effort.”15 While internees were banned from starting private enterprise, they were encouraged, as was the case with other Americans who were not incarcerated during World War II, to cultivate victory gardens, as an act of resourceful, not to mention patriotic, self-sufficiency.16 Indeed, at Poston, a camp established on the Colorado River Indian Reservation—the only one administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in conjunction with the WRA—the arrival of Japanese American internees was greeted enthusiastically by the Native Americans residing there, who hoped that the expertise and labor provided by these internees would materially improve infrastructure and living conditions at the reservation. The caption to Clem Albers’s portrait of Mrs. Ruby Snyder specifically pinned these hopes to the internees’ agricultural skills: “I hear that the Japanese are wonderful farmers. I would like to go down to see how they grow things.”17 Similarly, through the discourse of cultivation, officials sought to mitigate the symbolic implications of removing this industrious labor force from agricultural production—an argument that was especially persuasive when farmhands were lent out to assist in sugar beet harvesting and when internees at Manzanar contributed their expertise to the experimental cultivation of guayule. A rubber plant initiative at the camp spearheaded by researchers at

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the California Institute of Technology, the guayule experiment was meant to alleviate shortages of rubber. Considering the poor quality of the soil, however, it is hardly surprising that these lofty ambitions—whether of ensuring that the camps sustained their internees or of producing crops in response to emergency measures—were unfulfilled. Given this concern with cultivation, it is not unexpected that many photographs in this archive should often focus on depictions of the landscape of internment. Perhaps no photographer was more drawn to landscape conventions than Ansel Adams, whose perspective on Manzanar drew inspiration from the magisterial mountains that surrounded the camp. In 1943, Adams arrived in Manzanar with good intentions, eager to disprove to skeptics, such as Tom Maloney, editor of U.S. Camera (which in 1944 would publish his pictures of Manzanar in a collection titled Born Free and Equal), that nature photographs—or at least the kind Adams had been accustomed to making— were inappropriate in a time of war. Far from believing that landscapes were irrelevant, Adams insisted that this approach to photography was even more urgent during such troubled times. Recognizing the magnitude of his mission, he wrote to Nancy Newhall that “the most important job I have done this year is politically ‘hot’ and, therefore, confidential,”18 adding, “To me, the job is about as constructive a thing as anyone could do—and strictly American.”19 By the time he arrived at Manzanar, the harsh deprivations detailed in photographs taken by Lange, who focused on the chaotic early stages of the process, had been overcome.20 Impressed by the accomplishments of the internees, who seemed to have transformed arid plain into productive farmland, Adams found in the relocation the lesson of human triumph, which for him was most discernible in the harmony of people with nature, affirming in his book, “I believe that the acrid splendor of the desert, ringed with towering mountains, has strengthened the spirit of the people of Manzanar. I do not say all are conscious of this influence, but I am sure most have responded, in one way or another, to the resonances of their environment.”21 At the beginning of his book, he explains that “in these years of strain and sorrow, the grandeur, beauty, and quietness of the mountains are more important to us than ever before.” For this reason, he elaborates, “I have tried to record the influence of the tremendous landscape of Inyo on the life and spirit of thousands of people living by force of circumstance in the Relocation Center of Manzanar. Hence, while the people and their activities are my chief concern, there is much emphasis on the land throughout this book.”22 If Born Free and Equal juggles two subjects, the story of human triumph over adversity and that of natural beauty, this is because Adams’s thesis was that the latter made the former possible.

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Indeed, in 1934, almost a decade before his trip to Manzanar, Adams defined landscape in an article written for Camera Work: “all Natural Objects photographed in situ: distant and near views of land and sea, clouds, rocks and growing things (entire or in detail), and views which, although containing works of man, are dominately [sic] of landscape character. The subject is large and has no clearly defined restrictions.”23 Describing landscape as the most challenging subject for photography, Adams goes on to outline how an emotionally honest image is achieved by avoiding the tricks of Pictorialism, and attending to the contrastive gray scale that he called tone and key. According to his terms, many of his photographs of Manzanar are landscapes, since they are “dominately of landscape character.” The “settlement” of Manzanar was absorbed into his greater concern with the mountains beyond it. Its internees would also be presented in relation to the land as well as in terms of landscape ideology. His photos illustrate his determination to demonstrate the relevance and necessity of nature. Adams attempted to redeem the landscape through his unstated push to make the then-unpopular nature photographs compelling to a nation focused on war. In the process, however, the photos redeemed internment. Although Adams begins by foregrounding the restrictions of internment, his photos tend to look beyond the camps, suggesting that their confines can be transcended. The first photo in his book, the viewer’s welcome to Manzanar, ironizes the “welcome” sign and depicts the mountains as only a faint promise of freedom that lies beyond its ominous, inhospitable shadow. Yet Adams’s camera discovers that the mountains are reachable after all. In a wideangle photograph of the camp and its surrounds, Adams emphasizes neatness, order, and harmony, directing spectators to follow the main road that points directly to the mountains, rising above the land and seeming to lift the camp up with it. The barracks extend outward, horizontally, and while the vertical reach of the telephone poles is limited, the peaks of the range visually extend that reach. The barracks themselves appear arranged in a coherent, gridlike pattern. The barely distinguishable people, occupants of Adams’s view of the camp, are thus integrated harmoniously into his picturesque landscape. The pattern that seemed to catch Adams’s eye, and that he subsequently captured with his camera, was also a vertical and horizontal arrangement of people who tend to cluster in unified groups. Adams’s arrangement of people is a natural extension of the land they populate, as the camp is an extension of the landscape that is shown as a logical part of it. Adams illustrates the internees arranged harmoniously with the land so that they become a cohesive part of the landscape. This strategy is perhaps best illustrated in his homage to agricultural efficiency, a photo that emphasizes the neat vertical rows—which draw our eye in the approximate direction

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Figure 2.2  “Farm, farm workers, Mt. Williamson in background, Manzanar Relocation Center, California.” (Photo by Ansel Adams. LC-A351-T01-3-M-14, Library of Congress.)

of the mountain—and the orderly workers who attend to them, in keeping with claims of the success of the internment that extolled cultivation of land as evidence of Japanese American diligence, perseverance, and self-sufficiency (Figure 2.2). The neat rows act as symbolic directional markers to the mountains beyond the camp. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was during his work for Born Free and Equal, that Adams made two of his most famous photographs— Winter Sunrise, The Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California, 1944 and Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California, 1944, which were of landscapes solely and as such were not included in his Born Free and Equal project.24 Although Adams conceived of the land as an extension of his concern with the people, at times it appeared to distract him from his commitment to them. It was not that Adams had no regard for humanity; though it seems Adams interpreted the Manzanar project with the same naturalist’s appreciation that marked his other landscapes, Adams did photograph people. But even when nature served as backdrop, humans still functioned as background and natural

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Figure 2.3 Richard Kobayashi, farmer with cabbages, Manzanar Relocation Center, California. (Photo by Ansel Adams. LC-A35-T01-4-M-31, Library of Congress.)

objects as focal point. In a portrait of Richard Kobayashi, for example, Adams focuses on the farmer’s wide smile as he proudly displays on both arms the fruits of his harvest, giant heads of cabbage bigger even than his own head (Figure 2.3). Here, Adams integrates nature with man once more by stressing the symmetry between the cabbages that the man proudly bears in his two hands, the “fruit,” the picture makes clear, of his labors. Not surprisingly, more than a few skeptics remained unconvinced that Adams had in fact paid more attention to people than to his beloved rocks. Henri Cartier-Bresson once said of such purists, who constituted the Group f.64 movement,25 “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and [Edward] Weston are photographing rocks.”26 Indeed, Adams is notorious for photographing “rocks as if they were people,” and conversely presenting peo­ ple “as if they were rocks.”27 Lange was dismissive of his efforts, declaring that “it was far for him to go, far. He felt pretty proud of himself for being such a liberal [laughter] on that book. . . . But it was the only thing of its kind he’s ever tried to do and he’s proud of himself on that one. He doesn’t know how far short it is, not yet.”28

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Figure 2.4  “Evacuee farmers are here harvesting Daikon. . . .” (Photo by Francis Stuart. 210-GD-618, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.)

Adams’s vision of a transcendent nature and a redeeming experience of landscape is undermined by other photographs of farm labor, which depict rows as less orderly and mountains as more distant. In a photograph taken at Gila River in 1942 by WRA photographer Francis Stewart, for example, internees are shown in the midst of harvesting daikon (which the caption describes as a “great delicacy among the Japanese people”); the foliage is blurry, and, since most WRA photographs are sharply focused, unusually so (Figure  2.4). Shadows obscure the faces of farmers who, in other photographs taken close enough for facial features to be recognizable, are smiling. Here, the hidden faces are a marked contrast to the seemingly ubiquitous smile so prominent in Adams’s portrait and that, Alinder points out, can too easily be read as silent submission to the hardships of the internment. Rather, the solid torsos of the farmers—the clearest features of the photograph—are synecdoches of agricultural labor, undercutting the triumphant tone of Adams’s photographs. An even clearer contrast is provided in a 1944 photograph of Heart Mountain credited to Hikaru (“Carl”) Iwasaki, an internee hired by the WRA, which depicts assistant farm superintendent Eiichi Sakauye inspecting the soil in preparation for spring planting (Figure 2.5). In this photograph, numerous rows of dusty soil seem only to lead to more barren land, and the

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Figure 2.5  “Land cleared of sagebrush last fall and corrugated against wind erosion. Assistant Farm Superintendent, Eiichi Sakauye, checking the moisture for early Spring crop planting.” (Photo by Hikaru “Carl” Iwasaki. 210-GI-063, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.)

task of coaxing life from this intractable earth appears perhaps unbearable to this lone farmer, who works against a backdrop where the mountains are so distant they seem flat, collapsed against the dirt. Every success came with its hard price, Lange observed: “Well, they had the meanest dust storms there and not a blade of grass. And the springs are so cruel, when those people arrived there they couldn’t keep the tarpaper on the shades. Oh my, there were some pretty terrible chapters of that history.”29 Archie Miyatake, Toyo’s son, who spent his teenage years at Manzanar, recalls his introduction to the camp: “I will never forget our first night at Manzanar. A cold wind blew all night and whipped up a huge sandstorm. When I awoke the next morning my mouth and eyes were full of sand.”30 Archie recalls that, unlike the technically imperfect prints produced by his father, Adams’s photographs were pristine, taken as they were from a camera that was remarkably

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Figure 2.6  Farming during dust storm. (Photo by Toyo Miyatake. Courtesy of Miyatake Studios.)

“clean.”31 In a photograph by Toyo Miyatake, the features of tractor operator Mr. Matsuno are indistinguishable, hidden as they are by the goggles and mask that protect him from the dust storm (Figure 2.6). Despite his connection with Adams—Miyatake not only shared an acquaintance, Edward Weston, with Adams, but his own photographs are also included in more recent editions of Born Free and Equal—that suggest a continuity not only in style but also in ideological content, Miyatake’s photographs offer an accordingly revealing account of the ways that internees themselves variously contributed and responded to the discourse of cultivation. When his family received orders to evacuate in 1942, Toyo Miyatake was a forty-seven-year-old professional photographer based in Los Angeles. Although cameras were forbidden to Japanese Americans, he smuggled a lens and film holder into the camp, and, with the help of a carpenter friend who built a crude wooden box out of which a camera could operate, Miyatake constructed the equipment necessary to carry out his self-designated “historic duty.”32 When his activities were eventually discovered, camp director Ralph Merritt allowed Miyatake to continue composing pictures, but only if a guard snapped the shot.33 Eventually, even this restriction was eased, and Miyatake established

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Figure 2.7  Boys behind Barbed Wire. (Photo by Toyo Miyatake. Courtesy of Miyatake Studios.)

a photo shop at Manzanar, one of several businesses that operated as a camp cooperative. One of his most famous photographs features three boys posed behind barbed wire, an unambiguous reminder that, far from being a naturalist’s retreat, the internment was a carceral experience (Figure 2.7). This is perhaps why the barbed wire that symbolically slashes the photograph, fragmenting and cutting the boys’ bodies, is so prominent that it leaves scant space for other aspects of the internment experience, such as Adams’s nature appreciation. An explicit refutation of the seductions of landscape, the portrait of the boys behind barbed wire highlights the ways that corporeal discipline takes the form of spatial management. A similar, if subtler, testimony can also be seen even in Miyatake’s other photographs that do engage directly with landscape ideology. One can easily imagine how a photograph featuring an internee named Mr. Natsume tending to his chrysanthemums might affirm Adams’s naturalizing theme, were it not for the dramatic shadows, visual echoes of the barbed wire’s slash, that cut across the frame (Figure 2.8). Drawing inspiration from the strong shadows cast by the desert sun’s glare to suggest a prison’s

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Figure 2.8  “Watering rare chrysanthemum plants in ‘Nakata and Son’ hothouse.” (Photo by Francis Stewart. 210-GD-687, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.)

bars—a trope applied with similar and striking effect in Lange’s photograph of the lathe enclosure where guayule was cultivated and in Francis Stewart’s portrait of a man tending to chrysanthemum plants in a hothouse—Natsume’s confrontation with the camera reminds us of the darkness that encroaches on beauty. In contrast to Natsume’s somber, opaque stare, a defiance of this spatial management perhaps, the men stacked on top of the harvest flash seemingly ubiquitous smiles (Figure 2.9). At first glance a corroboration of Adams’s interest in nature’s bounty, the just rewards that redeem unjust actions, the

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Figure 2.9  Harvest. (Photo by Toyo Miyatake. Courtesy of Miyatake Studios.)

l­atter photograph nevertheless offers yet another refutation of this celebratory impulse. Arranged among the harvest, the men who are the subjects of the photograph, it is uncertain whether the produce or the laborers are to be delivered. This uncertainty serves as a reminder of the labor that, in photographs that are more “dominately” landscape, is otherwise overshadowed by the figure of nature’s bounty. Even when parts of the laborer’s body are obscured, as in Natsume’s opaque features or, more obviously, in the portrayal of tractor operator Mr. Matsuno—the toils of the body, in addition to the fruits of that toil, are highlighted. At the same time, photographs that invoke the materiality of the laboring body in this way do not wholly negate the fruitfulness of that labor. After all, in the photo taken by Miyatake, the men are arranged among the harvested vegetables, not instead of them, so that while a ­celebration,

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a thanksgiving, is to be recognized, so too must the sacrifice that would otherwise be too easily forgotten. Despite its continued engagement with landscape ideology, the return of the body in such photographs, whether through an explicit emphasis on the laborer’s toils or, perhaps even more significantly, through an implicit invocation of the laborer’s arrangement of the fruits of these toils, nevertheless offers countertestimony to the discourse of cultivation. The most poignant of these countertestimonies can be found in a selection of photographs taken by a special group of WRA photographers, internees such as Carl Iwasaki, Henry Ushioka, and Yone Kubo, who were hired by the organization’s Photographic Section (in contrast to Miyatake, whose photographs of the internment were taken on his own initiative) to help document the process of resettlement.34 When offered employment by the WRA for $2,000 per year (substantially higher wages than were provided under the modest pay structure of the camps, which offered $12, $16, and $19 per month according to skill level), internee photographers had to seek special clearance to depart on assignments. With the WRA as guarantor, these requests were readily processed and granted. Some of the photographs produced by these internees clearly affirm the agency’s recognizable documentary style, drawing specifically on the conventions of social realism for inspiration. As Lane Ryo Hirabayashi notes, while the WRA Photographic Section issued no formal directives, its approach was oriented toward the realism associated with photojournalism, which, drawing on the indexical qualities of photography, focused on the presentation of evidence.35 Social realism, with its more explicitly political purpose, is associated with stylistic flourishes that exalted laborers’ struggles. For example, in a photograph of a farmer operating a bean thrasher, taken by Iwasaki, man and machine are linked in a narrative affirming the dignity of agricultural labor (Figure 2.10). The contours of these struggles are plainly laid out in what can be considered a companion photograph, which shows the harvest at twilight. Enveloped in shadows that acquire legible form against the dimming sky, man and machine seem to merge into the soil’s unrelenting demand for sacrifice. Although WRA photographs taken by internee recruits largely embraced the organization’s signature style, a few of them, taken by Henry Ushioka, broke entirely from social realism. Instead, though these photographs return again to the harvest as subject for reflection, they stand out as, to my knowledge, one of few internment photographs (a handful out of thousands and thousands) to turn to the conventions of still life as inspiration. Still-life photography draws upon the lengthy historical tradition of its sister art, painting. By definition a representation of inanimate objects, stilllife pictures have been described as nature imitation, and despite their inferior position in the hierarchy of arts—they occupy an even lower position than landscape—they nevertheless raise intriguing questions about the stakes of this

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Figure 2.10  “Heichi Sakauye, resident of Heart Mountain Relocation Center, is shown operating a bean thrasher [sic] on the center’s exclusive agriculture farm.” (Photo by Hikaru Iwasaki. 210-8G-221, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.)

imitation. One way of distinguishing still life from landscape, for example, is, as Charles Sterling points out in his classic book on the genre, that the former isolates the natural object, and in so doing the artist “performs an intellectual and poetic act with far reaching consequences: he disrupts the natural unity of the world, he takes an inanimate object out of an organic whole which gave it life.”36 More than a displaced object, the still life, Norman Bryson argues, focuses on the “culture of artifacts,” and therefore gestures toward a too easily overlooked material history.37 As interior reflections on domestic life whose ordinariness is signaled by the ubiquitous table that holds these artifacts,

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Figure 2.11  “The Giant Pascal celery stands 29″ high and is the average size produced by the agricultural section of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center.” (Photo by Henry Ushioka. 210-GG-768, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.)

still-life pictures attest to the layers and textures that this artfully laden surface would otherwise conceal. The harvest tables at the internment camps are no less storied. Ushioka’s still-life photographs share with the social realist photographs that are the dominant aesthetic of WRA photography a concern with representing an indexical reality, but one that is demonstrably composed and stylized. A continuity between social realism and still life is suggested in Ushioka’s 1944 photograph of a sample from the harvest with the proud caption: “The Giant Pascal celery stands 29″ high and is the average size produced by the agricultural section of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center” (Figure 2.11). Two specimens are arranged on a tabletop, the most prominent propped upright, so as to showcase its dimensions as recorded on the tape that extends from the table against the unremarkable background wall. That this display is not wholly utilitarian is suggested by the second specimen—surely unnecessary for a sense of dimension and scale provided by the measuring

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tape—placed across the tabletop. Moreover, the artfully gathered folds of the cloth that stretches across the tabletop suggest that this prop is not merely functional. Besides marking the specimen’s size, the measuring tape divides the picture plane neatly in half. One side is cast mostly in a stark light on a smooth, unadorned surface, while the other side, with its suggestive folds and less identifiable shadows, represents the harvest in excess of the accounting provided by its counterpart. Blocking one side in the positivist clarity of social realism from the more impressionist side of the still life, the measuring tape marks the threshold, then, between denotation (description) and connotation (ideology). That the two are brought together within the photograph suggests that even though the contrast is stark, the two are not so different after all. Despite this clear division between social realism, or an explicitly political representation of reality, and still life, a seemingly stylized meditation on reality, Ushioka’s clever juxtaposition reveals continuities between these styles. Still life draws on the same subjects as social realism for inspiration. Conversely, for all its apparent objectivity, social realism is as carefully composed as still life. Whereas the photograph of the celery reflects on the unsettling relationship between social realism and still life, Ushioka’s other photographs, in wholly embracing still life, can be seen as an emphatic rejection of social realism’s ideological perspective on cultivation. Another photograph by Ushi­ oka, also from 1944, takes as its theme the harvest’s abundance, and features this time not just the celery that was earlier highlighted but also, according to the detailed caption, fifty-two varieties of crop grown at Heart Mountain (Figure 2.12).38 We return to the simple props of the table, folds of tablecloth and unadorned background—with significant differences, however. Artfully arranged so as to suggest a paradoxically artless plenitude, the composition of the still-life photograph seems to join in Adams’s celebration of the productive industry of Japanese American farmers. The “American” framework of this celebration is underscored by the variety of vegetables, which, with the exception of the daikon (listed in the original caption but not easily identifiable), seem to be local. The still-life photograph seems to extol the virtues of cultivation, harvest without evidence of labor. Yet, though central to the still-life photograph, this praise of cultivation is undermined by a poster (featuring an illustrated warship and the imperative to serve in silence) suspended to the left, and thus juxtaposed against the display of the harvest. Even though the service to which the poster refers is military, it can nevertheless be seen as an ironic commentary on cultivation. After all, the WRA had long insisted that cultivation constituted a contribution to the war effort. With this invocation of uncomplaining service, labor’s muted cry is symbolically sounded in the still-life photograph. If the display of the harvest, for all its attention to aesthetic arrangement—evidence of the operator’s

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Figure 2.12  “Harvest is on at Heart Mountain.” (Photo by Henry Ushioka. 210-GG765, National Archives, College Park, Maryland.)

discerning eye—bears no direct evidence of the laborers’ weary hands, the poster’s indirect but powerful reminder of the dual resonances of what it means to serve reveals the struggles that the focus on cultivation would otherwise obscure. At the same time, the poster’s martial message is undermined, recast as it is against a frozen setting that evinces none of the glorious forward momentum depicted in the illustration of the warship. Indeed, the celebration of Thanksgiving subtly suggested by this portrayal of the harvest evokes the losses that shadow this plenitude. Although Thanksgiving was first institutionalized as a national holiday by Benjamin Franklin in 1789, its origins in the Calvinist festivals held in 1621 predate the nation.39 As a commemoration of survival, celebration of the Thanksgiving harvest table depicted in this still life lays claim to, while also questioning, this history that is both national and not-national, an indeterminacy that conditions the internment camps as well as the camps’ subjects. In these ways, the photograph manages two seemingly irreconcilable aims: mounting a critique of the discourse of cultivation, without at the same time discounting the laborers’ struggles and their undeniable triumphs. In the war’s waning days, the meanings of service and silence shadow what at first glance appears to be merely an expression of thanksgiving. With the war’s end and the closing of the camps, the task of ­undermining

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the discourse of cultivation without unwittingly reifying it proved no less challenging.

Photography in the Postinternment Period Most historians trace photography’s prominence in national reckoning to the early 1970s. After a long period of traumatic self-reflection, the first public grappling with the visual representation of the internment was not prominently displayed until 1972—a date that coincides, as I show shortly, with the first stirrings of a redress movement—with Executive Order 9066, an exhibit sponsored by the California Historical Society consisting of works collected by Maisie and Richard Conrat in the 1960s. Opening at the De Young Museum, the exhibit traveled throughout the country and occasionally received hate mail by white protesters who found the political critique offensive.40 Nearly a decade later, Go for Broke, an exhibition focused on the contributions of Infantry Regiment 442, opened in 1981 at the Presidio Army Museum in the San Francisco Bay area. This exhibition profoundly influenced the National Museum of American History (NMAH) in Washington, D.C. Drawing on the material in Go for Broke and extending it so that the museum’s consideration of the theme of the “constitution” (in honor of the founding document’s two hundredth anniversary) might cover a fuller range of Japanese American experiences beyond military service, the NMAH launched A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the United States Constitution on October 1, 1987. Today, A More Perfect Union remains a popular online exhibition. Indeed, histories of the postinternment period, when they do note the role of photography, seem to suggest that the visual record somehow disappeared for nearly three decades, until survivors had gathered the strength to look at them again. This political process can be traced to an earlier moment, however. The work of Toyo Miyatake continued with unabated energy and urgency even after the last camps closed. Indeed, he contributed to perhaps the first public attempt to come to terms with the internment, which began, not in the 1970s, but rather almost immediately with the end of World War II, and was published soon after in 1952. Beauty behind Barbed Wire: The Arts of the Japanese in Our War Relocation Camps, a project organized by Allen H. Eaton, who is credited as author, is a powerful collection of photographs of crafts made by internees, which had the support not only of a Guggenheim Fellowship but also of Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote a foreword to the book. Central to the book’s goal of unification and reconciliation were photographs, many of which were selected from the WRA archive. A number of these photographs were also commissioned for the project. Miyatake was one of the photographers hired by Eaton.

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For Eaton, the arts were an important way of reconciling the internment, though in his prologue the admiration he expresses for the resourcefulness of Japanese Americans suspiciously echoes the naïve notes of nature appreciation. In his introduction, Eaton wrote that such an exhibition . . . would help overcome the barriers of language; it might give the internees a sense of their relatedness to many friendly people outside; another important thing—it might encourage some of them to make things with their own hands—this would help to ease mental strains, and possibly contribute to a good community spirit. The Japanese, more than any people I know had a genius for making something out of almost nothing, so scarcity of materials need not be considered a deterrent.41 Reflecting on the serenity of one garden he looked at in 1945, he commented that it is a reminder of “what can be done by utilizing the rough materials at hand, most of which would be regarded as valueless, if not as liabilities, by the average person.”42 Despite his good intentions, this project demonstrates the difficulty of drawing on art as the basis for critique, however implicit, of the injustices of the internment. The photographs themselves offered ways of reconciling this predicament, however. Beauty behind Barbed Wire pointedly turned away from the functional fruits of the agricultural harvest to dwell instead on nonutilitarian creations. Instead of the farm, photographs in this exhibition focused on lush gardens that featured rocks and native plant species such as varieties of cacti, adapted to climatic conditions and dry soil, and made creative use of found objects including scrap wood (tied together to make fanciful arches and picket fences) and stones for sculptural centerpieces. To showcase industry without harvest, at least not in the sense celebrated in many internment photographs, can be seen as an effective way of refusing the discourse of cultivation that Eaton affirmed; indeed, the photographs often undermined the text. Another way of refusing this discourse draws on the conventions of still life and, less obviously, landscape. Miyatake’s photograph titled Artifacts from Three Centers invites contemplation, in a manner that draws on classic composition techniques, of a trio of inanimate objects—an artificial vine, cherry blossoms crafted from shells on wood, and polished wood—making use of the large block of negative space at the center of the photograph to direct viewers’ eyes in a triangular pattern (Figure 2.13). Moreover, the objects refer to each other so that the vine’s foliage is visually reflected in the carefully arranged petals on the wooden board, and the natural surface of the board is in turn wrought into more organic form in the polished block that rests in the foreground.

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Figure 2.13  Artifacts from Three Centers. (This photograph, by Toyo Miyatake, appeared in Beauty behind Barbed Wire. Courtesy of Miyatake Studios.)

The centrality of these three objects is further emphasized through the use of the textured scrim, which folds the background into a horizontal surface, helping to minimize shadows that, though they served important rhetorical functions in other internment photographs, are potentially distracting here. That this scrim seems to be sisal, a material made from agave fibers that were likely locally available, is important given the project’s overall emphasis on the

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crafting of found objects. In this regard, the background is not just a neutral backdrop that sets into relief the objects in the foreground, but rather is an extension of them. This folding of surfaces creates the illusion of a continuous background, which significantly stretches beyond what can actually be seen, suggesting that this story about the crafting of nature extends beyond the frame.43 From the harvest and its attendant celebration of nature’s cultivation, and from landscape’s nature appreciation, the eye moves here to meditate on a different, crafted representation of nature. Even without the embodied form of three artisans whose labor transformed these found objects, the emphasis on crafting arguably suffices as a reminder of their toiling hands. Moreover, although this photograph’s focus on inanimate objects is in keeping with still-life conventions, the disappearance of still life’s requisite table—whose surface may be concealed beneath the scrim—is a reminder that the subject for contemplation has radically shifted. Indeed, the trail of the vine, besides pointing to its visual echo formed by the blossoms on the wooden plank, can be seen as a reference to a cliché in landscape photographs, whereby foreground foliage frames the background view. In its incorporation of references from both landscape and still life, Artifacts from Three Centers redirects attention from bountiful nature, effectively questioning, through the conventions that have helped to fashion it so, the cultural framework that celebrates nature in this way. The title of this photograph thus has a dual meaning, referring to the source of these artifacts—camps located at Gila River, Tule Lake, and Jerome—as well as highlighting this triangulated contemplation. Despite the approach that Toyo Miyatake and other photographers offer for tackling the challenge of memorializing labor without reifying cultivation, these lessons were not fully taken up in the postinternment period. Given the ways that cultivation provided, through a laudatory screen focused on industry and self-sufficiency, an effective means of symbolically vindicating the state for the internment, it may seem surprising that this theme persisted beyond the closing of the camps. Nevertheless, far from fading into obscurity, as the camps themselves were inexorably reclaimed by dereliction and desert dust, cultivation survived the ignominy of the internment as a controversial strategy for redressing the injustices of Executive Order 9066.

Cultivating Redress Though internment photographs were neither a prominent nor explicit feature of the redress movement (compared with, say, survivor testimony), their concern with discourses of civility nevertheless shadows the movement. Indeed, the coincidence of important exhibitions of internment photographs briefly traced earlier with the emergence of the modern redress movement suggests

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that the features associated with the former may influence, however indirectly, the stakes of the latter. What are the links between the discursive construction of internment photographs and those associated with the redress movement? Historians and activists have exhaustively documented the redress movement.44 In the immediate aftermath of the relocation in the waning days of World War II, the Japanese American community was focused on recovering from severe financial and emotional losses. An organized and concerted political response to the internment would have to wait until the devastated community had sufficiently regrouped. This is not to say, however, that the internment remained wholly unchallenged. Despite the photographs’ emphasis on order, tensions seethed and strikes and riots unsettled official narratives that the camps were a pleasant respite, a holiday even, from the privations of war suffered by the rest of the country. Not only did many defy Executive Order 9066, but three Japanese Americans, Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Minoru Yasui, who were charged with violating curfew, were featured in the Supreme Court cases Korematsu v. United States, Hirabayashi v. United States, and Yasui v. United States, which tested the constitutionality of the internment (which was upheld on the grounds of the now refuted argument of military necessity). The possibility of redress was, however, first broached by the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) in 1970 and gained momentum in the late 1970s and, especially, the 1980s. There was no guarantee that the movement would succeed. Given the limited influence of Japanese Americans (who then constituted a fraction of the American population and whose fractured community bitterly fought over strategies for redress) and the political climate (the federal deficit was at an alltime high and Republican president Ronald Reagan was initially on record for being opposed to redress)—the movement, as Leslie T. Hatamiya puts it, had all the portents of a “political disaster,”45 and its improbable success seemed, for political theorists at least, nothing short of a “miracle.”46 Given the fact that other struggles, notably the African American movement for reparations for slavery, remain stymied by unrelenting popular and political opposition, the Japanese American achievement seems all the more remarkable. Why was the Japanese American movement for redress victorious? Scholars detail several crucial factors. A shift away from the blatant racism that during World War II focused on scapegoating Japanese Americans laid the foundation for sympathetic treatment of the issue of redress. Additionally, the legislative route to redress, which involved the savvy enlistment of key political allies and the publication of Personal Justice Denied, a report issued by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), proved efficacious.47 Released in 1983, the report documented the material and psychic losses of internment, so that when H.R. 442 was introduced, there

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was no need to establish whether a wrong had occurred. When it came time to debate on redress, the more pressing concern was the most appropriate form of remedy, and, ultimately, the recommendations outlined in the report were taken up. On August 10, 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which issued, on behalf of the U.S. government, a national apology for the internment and payment of $20,000 to surviving internees. Though these historical and political explanations for the success of the Japanese American redress movement are persuasive, another important yet frequently overlooked factor was the JACL’s strategic deployment of the discourse of civility, which can be seen as a continuation of its controversially accommodationist position during World War II. Taking its cues from the JACL, which emphasized themes of patriotism (or rather “super patriotism”) and heroism—after all, H.R. 442 was clearly numbered in honor of the celebrated Japanese American infantry regiment—congressional debates on redress focused on the community’s “good citizenship,” or steadfast loyalty to a nation that did not always recognize or even confer citizenship to its members.48 According to one representative, internees were “model citizens of our community at the time when they were placed in the detention camps.” Photographs played a minor role in debates, providing, historian Alice Yang Murray notes, evidence that the internment camps were, in fact, prisons, and refuting any attempt to characterize them otherwise.49 In a significant rhetorical move recalling the landscape ideology of internment photographs, discussion collapsed military service with agricultural productivity—patriotism abroad and cultivation at home—as evidence of civil conduct, so that the “self-discipline and ability” of internees had “enabled them to turn California deserts into gardens.” Indeed, “never troublemakers,” they were the “most dignified and public spirited citizens in their community.”50 In the course of the debates, qualities of obedience, industry, and self-sacrifice were ascribed to Japanese Americans, who were thus commended as worthy subjects deserving of redress. That these qualities are also associated with the model minority—a figure whose exemplarity, as the Introduction explains, is based on conduct that is civil—is hardly surprising. Indeed, it is no coincidence that during the 1980s, when the issue of redress for the internment was debated among politicians, stories commending the model minority circulated more prominently than they had since William Petersen’s initial piece emerged in the midst of civil rights struggle in the 1960s.51 Considering that the 1980s marked a period when the question of civil rights was again urgently asked, the reemergence of the model minority (a figure that never wholly went away) offers, as it did in the 1960s, an answer of sorts to this question. If, as I have argued, the civil conduct of the model minority serves as an affront to 1960s yellow power struggles, rendering

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them “uncivil,” then more than two decades later, the model minority’s return may likewise serve unstated yet significant ideological purposes. To grasp the stakes of this return, consider that in the political construction of redress-worthiness, patriotism was defined as accommodation of and cooperation with the executive order, despite its contravention of the civil rights protections enshrined within the constitution. In this narrative of super patriotism, the ideal citizen complies with the state even when effectively stripped of the rights of citizenship. The ideal citizen, moreover, does so without complaint. What significance, then, did defiance and resistance have for civil rights struggles in the late 1960s and beyond, after the end of the civil rights movement? If debates on redress are any indication, it would seem very little. Overlooked in these debates was the fact that the push for a commission report was by no means supported unanimously within the Japanese American community and marked a moment when division over the issue of redress was perhaps most pronounced. Instead of a legislative route, critics, led by William Hohri of Chicago, formed the National Council for Japanese American Redress (NCJAR) and sought redress through a class-action lawsuit,52 a strategy that can be seen as a more direct challenge to, rather than collaborative solicitation of, the system that authorized the internment. Another challenge, focused on the writ of coram nobis, sought to overturn the earlier convictions of Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Yasui, contending that a manifest injustice had been committed. Yet congressional debates on redress nevertheless remained conspicuously silent about these more direct challenges, and instead were only too eager to take their cue from the JACL’s uncomplaining style of complaint—an approach that provided convenient absolution for the injuries being redressed. As legal scholar Chris Iijima observes, “Congress expressed its solicitude for the very people whose political views accommodated and, indeed, helped to exacerbate the very injustice that Congress condemned by the redress bill. This congressional solicitude sends an unambiguous message—there are rewards for acquiescence.”53 Likewise, in struggles for civil rights, there are, apparently, rewards for civil conduct rather than for disobedience, an “uncivil” way of broaching racial grievance. As therapeutic absolution for victim and aggressor, the public dispensation of rewards serves a geopolitical purpose also. In the waning days of the Cold War, when irrevocable tears in the Iron Curtain had yet to be anticipated, redress enabled the United States, critics have argued, “unblushingly to tout democracy and human rights in its hard push against communism in the Soviet Union and central Europe.”54 In drawing attention to issues that are part of what Eric K. Yamamoto aptly describes as the “darker underside of the reparations process,”55 my aim

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is neither to diminish the importance of this momentous moral victory nor to castigate the JACL for its leadership. My concern, rather, is with understanding how codes of civility informed the photographic representation of the internment and the persistence of these codes in the redress movement. The felicitous alignment of the JACL’s solicitation of redress and the “congressional solicitude” described by Iijima reveals the limitations of political apology: when political apology only serves the purposes of compensation without attending to the principle of repair, it bandages rather than heals injury. Jacques Derrida cautions precisely against this compensatory approach, noting that it involves “always the same concern: to see to it that the nation survives its discords, that the traumatisms give way to the work of mourning, and that the Nation-State not be overcome by paralysis. But even where it could be justified, this ‘ecological’ imperative of social and political health has nothing to do with ‘forgiveness,’ which when spoken of in these terms is taken far too lightly. Forgiveness does not, it should never amount to a therapy of reconciliation.”56 Moreover, the limit of forgiveness can be observed, Derrida argues, “each time forgiveness is at the service of a finality, be it noble and spiritual (atonement or redemption, reconciliation, salvation), each time that it aims to re-establish a normality (social, national, political, psychological) by a work of mourning, by some therapy or ecology of memory, then the ‘forgiveness’ is not pure—nor is it a concept. Forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalizing. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible: as if it interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality.”57 In these eloquent passages, Derrida characterizes the nation-state’s central concern with selfrenewal through the curious metaphor of ecology (French écologie), one that recurs at significant moments in his analysis. While the metaphor, drawing from its Greek roots (oikos, “house or dwelling”), chiefly underscores the concept of social groups and systemic injustice that the “therapy of reconciliation” pointedly refuses to restructure, it also denotes the concept of nature, familiar since the 1960s emergence of environmental consciousness. This “therapy” is deficient, Derrida argues, precisely because it naturalizes—that is, normalizes— systemic injustice. In their deployment of landscape ideology and concern with discourses of cultivation, internment photographs can be seen to anticipate the “ecological” dimensions of political forgiveness. As I have argued, the photographs themselves often naturalized the camps by focusing on the cultivation of nature as a means of symbolically reconciling the people who labored on the land with the system that sentenced them to that labor. Assessed together, the photos of internment engage with the symbolic implications of internment. At best an equivocal record of liberal policies, the photographs bear, in turn, an ambivalent perspective on the Japanese Americans whom they are meant to represent.

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The “land” thus functioned in crucial ways within the complex representational project that is internment photography: the evacuation effectively served as a means of dispossessing Japanese Americans from the communities that they had worked hard to establish and cultivate; within the new space in which they were interned, the apparent conquest of intractable desert was heralded as evidence of the resilience of the community, justifying the executive order; and yet resettlement nonetheless helped ensure the fracturing of this community. Although internment photographs ostensibly portrayed the plight of people, at times their frequent deferrals to landscape ironically relegated these people to the background. Even when the photographs did not directly influence the formal process of political reckoning, cultivation thus subtly persisted as a way of blunting its harsh edges. Indeed, instead of reckoning, the process—with its marked praise of what I have called civil conduct—involved reconciliation. In this manner, the “landscape” of internment was often incorporated into an “ecology” of apology, as part of a therapy of reconciliation. Through a striking engagement with landscape conventions that highlighted symbolic unity, internment photographs tended to affirm the theme of national unity emphasized in other contemporaneous photography projects. It did so even as the experience of internment provided seemingly irrefutable evidence of disunity on which national identity was necessarily based. Moreover, it did so even while a counternarrative that reintroduced laborers’ struggles as a symbolic refusal of the consolations of the discourse of cultivation was developed within this very archive.

3 A Manner of Apology Transpacifism and the Scars of Reparation Kim saw my grief, my pain, my sorrow. . . . She held out her arms to me and embraced me. All I could say was “I’m sorry; I’m sorry”—over and over again. And at the same time she was saying, “It’s all right, I forgive you.” —John Plummer, quoted in Johann Christoph Arnold, Why Forgive?

F

ew scenes of reconciliation could be more touching than that between Kim Phuc, the famous “girl in the picture”1 whose anguished escape from the flames of a napalm attack is captured in one of the most famous war photographs of the twentieth century, Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Trang Bang, 1972 (Figure 3.1), and John Plummer, the veteran who has claimed responsibility for ordering the air strike that fateful day. In drawing explicitly on the “Abrahamic language” that structures even secular state apologies,2 the exchange between Kim Phuc, a born-again Christian who is currently a UN Goodwill Ambassador and Plummer, a Methodist minister, seems to gesture toward political reckoning between the nations they appear to represent.3 Indeed, set against the national backdrop of Veterans Day ceremonies in 1996, the poignant reconciliation between Kim Phuc and John Plummer appears to enact an official narrative of forgiveness. Because Kim Phuc is a naturalized Canadian, however, her gesture extends yet remains peripheral to the U.S. nation-state. Veterans’ groups were also outraged by Plummer’s presumption, fearing that the apology risked undermining recognition of their service, hard won after the shame of defeat in an unpopular war. Moreover, they contend that the apology was unwarranted since Plummer may not have been responsible for the attack. Plummer’s superior at the time, Major General Niles J. Fulwyler, insists that he was not authorized to play so central a role in the events of Trang Bang. On whose behalf was Plummer apologizing? For that matter, on whose behalf was Kim Phuc dispensing forgiveness?4 This chapter considers the ways that apology constitutes an act of civility in attempting to heal psychic and physical wounds suffered by citizens and

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Figure 3.1  Trang Bang, 1972. (AP Photo/Nick Ut.)

noncitizens, by focusing on visual culture’s mediation of the scarred female body as a means of rejuvenating national affect. In foundational theoretical accounts of the so-called age of apology, morality rather than civility is highlighted as one of the primary political motivations of reconciliation. Most notably, Elazar Barkan confirms Nicholas Tavuchis’s view of apology as a “moral expedition,”5 contending that the proliferation of apologies associated with this age marks the emergence of a “new morality.”6 Yet Barkan’s characterization of this new morality as “the extension of Enlightenment principles and human rights to peoples and groups previously excluded from such considerations” 7 frames reconciliation directly within the discourse of civility, even though it is not named as such. Premised on neo-Enlightenment values, a philosophical framework of liberal humanism that Girma Negash likewise singles out as a crucial tradition informing the “burgeoning apology practice,”8 Barkan’s new morality revives old forms of conduct. As Lisa Lowe reminds us, these humanist values are haunted by the Enlightenment’s dark legacies: the promise of equality is betrayed by the fact of inequality; freedom is shadowed by the specter of unfreedom. The racialized and gendered subjects who emerge on the Enlightenment’s fringes and are the objects of the new morality’s remorseful regard have shaped, even as

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they have historically been denied the benefits of, “modern constructions of freedom, civility, and justice.”9 For Tavuchis, whose sociological study of apology draws (among a wide range of texts) on etiquette books for analysis, the linkage between apology and civility is most evident in his optimistic defense of the “humanizing and civilizing potential of apology.”10 The “manner” of apology that this chapter explores, then, denotes simultaneously the civility that underwrites overtures of reconciliation as well as the equivocations that undermine the political effectiveness of these apologies. Although medical philanthropy is perhaps the most significant of these overtures, it has rarely been taken up in debates about reconciliation, which have instead tended to focus on state-based apologies and, increasingly, on apologies on the part of corporations. In contexts when official apologies are not forthcoming, what are the political implications of unofficial gestures of rapprochement? I argue that transpacific altruism, a gesture I call transpacifism— which consists of humanitarian initiatives carried out under the ethical guidance of the “civilian gaze”11 conjured by atrocity images, and whose significance reaches across the Pacific and binds the United States to these sites—served as a means of symbolic reconciliation, acceptable only because it did not seem to do so. The drama of forgiveness between Plummer and Kim Phuc elucidates the equivocal positions held officially by the state and, unofficially, by activists and veterans’ groups, in reconciling acts of aggression committed within the Pacific theater of war. In a context in which reparations for the Vietnam War are unlikely to be negotiated, the exchange brings into relief the tension between, on the one hand, private avowals of sorrow and sympathy and, on the other hand, public disavowal of guilt and atonement; the effusions of the former set into relief the ambivalences and telling silences of the latter, in a compensatory structure, that was, this chapter shows, established nearly five decades earlier. Indeed, the meeting between Kim Phuc and Plummer at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial eerily echoes similar dramas of rapprochement that unfolded in connection with the Hiroshima Maidens project, a 1955 humanitarian mission conducted within the United States, whose purpose was to reconstruct the disfiguring scars caused by the atomic bombing of Japan. Relying on the donation of charitable gifts and the services of leading surgeons at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, the project provided a group of women the most advanced plastic surgery procedures possible in the United States, unavailable at that time in a resource-strapped and technologically underdeveloped postwar Japan. Despite the fact that these events are the consequence of attacks that are significantly different (i.e., whereas napalm is a conventional weapon, the atomic

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bomb is a weapon of mass destruction) and occur at markedly different historical moments, there is nevertheless a striking and revelatory connection. While the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often justified on the basis that they helped end World War II mercifully, their protracted aftermath—the guilt and fraught goodwill in response to the victims’ plight—are part of a Cold War structure of feeling that similarly describes the deluge of outrage and sympathy focused on Kim Phuc’s suffering. These events also share an intense focus on the female body, particularly the evidence of war atrocities borne by its scars. These cases have received spectacular treatment in the visual field, particularly in photographs that circulated widely within national and international newspapers and magazines as well as on television as melodramas of reconciliation. As Keith Beattie points out, the scar is simultaneously a symbol of wounding and healing,12 in turn connoting a vexed duality of national division and unity. Although this duality has been sensitively explored in terms of America’s remasculinization in the wake of defeat in Vietnam,13 its peculiar feminization has only recently been considered.14 Analysis of the representation of these remarkable cases reveals intriguing parallels that politicize seemingly apolitical expressions of humanitarian sympathy. The personal commitment to repair the scarred female body constitutes an indirect way of attending to male wounds of war. Moreover, this commitment is earnestly avowed through reference to sentimental discourse centered on the presentability, marriageability, and productivity of the Napalm Girl and her predecessors, the Hiroshima Maidens. The affective response to these visible signs of human catastrophe constitute a manner of apology, affirming feminine modes of civil comportment under the sign of sentiment while at the same time providing a vexed way of addressing the issue of apology. Broadly symbolic of a rapprochement between East and West, the reunion between “victim” and “aggressor” ends up domesticating Asians in the United States, as Americans are confronted by the physical evidence, displayed on women’s visibly scarred bodies, of the nation’s indelible yet largely unresolved and unreconciled Pacific entanglements. At the same time, these dramas put pressure on the category of Asian Americans, for it is the bodies of noncitizens for whom sympathetic engagements are solicited through a shared sense of embodied vulnerability, a process that some argue rests on the principle of “biological citizenship”—a biopolitical subject formation marked by its condition of bare life—who signify traumatic encounters between the United States and Asia. Through their solicitation as “foreigners” or noncitizens, who serve as key players in ongoing debates concerning reconciliation, they provide tangible evidence of fraught transpacific crossings variously described by critics as “America’s Asia” and as Asian/America, in which grammatical signs of possession and slashing mark the shifting boundaries between these terrains.15

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So fraught is this issue that reconciliation itself, what it means and the ends it serves, is by no means clear. At times defined as a just settling of accounts established by means of the speech act of apology, and, at still other moments, as a position of equality impossible to achieve without reparation, or material compensation, for injury—some argue that even with material compensation, reconciliation is still impossible—the complex terms for reconciliation are what remain crucially at stake in this persisting fascination with the figure of the scar. As a means of attending to historical trauma and to redressing injustice, apology constitutes an important valence of civility that, in the wake of violence within the Pacific theater of war, offers a sympathetic, though unofficial, means of connecting citizen with noncitizen.

Terms of Treatment Following World War II, images of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki exposed the annihilation of these cities, the most famous being the iconic mushroom cloud, while still others featured rubble and ruin. Although photographs focused on architectural devastation, conspicuously missing from them were signs of human injury. Censorship ensured that the human consequences of atomic attack were moved beyond the range of scopic and political accountability. Even though the sight of scarred survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hard to miss, for a long time these injuries remained unacknowledged, in part because they also often avoided the sight of their own deformities as well as the company of others. Many Japanese shunned survivors, whose wounds, as vivid reminders of a humiliating defeat, provoked disgust and shame rather than outrage and sympathy. The term hibakusha, commonly translated as “survivor,” also connoted stigma. Superstition that this victimization was deserved as a kind of karmic retribution, and fear that radiation exposure made them vulnerable to heritable genetic mutations and cancers, ensured that survivors were unable to solicit a seemingly indifferent government, whose authority was severely diminished during the U.S. Occupation, for the special treatment their injuries required. Given widespread restrictions on showing and corresponding reluctance to witnessing survivors’ bodies, it is perhaps little wonder that photographs exposing such scars emerged only after 1952, when the American Occupation began its withdrawal from Japan. Until then, censorship helped justify the attacks, as part of a policy that vehemently resisted admission of regret for them.16 Within this charged context, unsurprisingly, neither the Japanese government nor the Occupation authorities did much to assuage the suffering of the hibakusha, and few seemed to pay attention to their plight. With little if any support from the Japanese government, which would not grant free medical care

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to the hibakusha until 1957 with the passage of the A-bomb Victims Medical Care Law, patients were left with little choice but to fund procedures themselves to treat their painful keloid scars.17 If merely to acknowledge and represent the scarred body was politically dangerous, even riskier as a potential gesture of atonement was the offer of treatment. Particularly controversial was the fact that whereas Japanese surgeons were able to provide only limited help for the hibakusha, the greater expertise and capacity of Occupation resources were not enlisted for the benefit of survivors. Instead, only months after the war ended, the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) established offices near affected areas, with the aim of conducting a massive study of the human effects of radiation exposure. In acknowledging the fact of human damage, such a research emphasis, on the one hand, seems a flagrant contradiction of the message maintained in photographs of Hiroshima of that period, which denied such damage. On the other hand, the ABCC’s mandate was as an extension of the same logic of contained knowledge that regulated the content of this photography: protected by the veil of scientific objectivity, the study provided documentary unburdened by critical commentary. Little wonder, then, that the large-scale scientific scrutiny of the hibakusha led some to speculate cynically whether the bomb was dropped in order to produce subjects for study, and still others to resent the fact that such subjects seemed to be handled like “guinea pigs.”18 Nothing provoked more ire, however, than the ABCC’s policy of study without treatment, which was widely seen as an unethical contravention of the Hippocratic oath. Notably, accusations of hypocrisy were rife in the wake of the U.S. testing of the hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, which in March 1954 coated the Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon) with radiation fallout. John S. Morton, director of the ABCC at the time, made the scandalous move of publicly offering to treat the surviving fishermen. According to Herbert Passin, an anthropologist living in Japan at the time, this was “one of the worst mistakes of all,” suggesting either that the “original contention that the ABCC could not provide treatment was untrue,” or that the ABCC “wanted these fresh cases for research purposes.”19 Historian Susan Lindee notes that, though often maligned, this policy was defended on many grounds.20 Within this harsh position, however, cracks can be faintly discerned: behind the screen of public policy, ABCC doctors surreptitiously provided selective treatment, in some cases even diverting a small portion of operating funds for doing so. That such deviations proceeded without reprimand suggests tacit approval for treatment; so long as it remained covert, such treatment avoided any suspicion of atonement.21 Nevertheless, it was clear that whereas study was politically acceptable, treatment was not. It would seem that to treat the hibakusha is tantamount to atoning, and thereby conceding guilt, for the atomic attacks. In this way,

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the ABCC’s policy reflected and affirmed the dominant position, which was unequivocally opposed to atonement. By the early 1950s, no one doubted that something had to be done to relieve the suffering of the hibakusha; less obvious was how best to do so. Medical philanthropy, as one of the methods by which some Americans would come to terms with the decision to drop the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention with the consequences of that decision, also offered an opportunity to do so without the explicit offer of apology. The Hiroshima Maidens project, a philanthropic mission spearheaded by Norman Cousins,22 editor of the Saturday Review, and Kiyoshi Tanimoto,23 a U.S.-educated Japanese minister practicing in Hiroshima, stepped in to intervene. Under the auspices of the program, twenty-five young women carefully selected from forty-three hopeful applicants were to undergo 130 procedures over the course of eighteen months. What set this initiative apart from other philanthropic missions was its approach, which offered an important model of transpacifism. Instead of disbursing money abroad to help the needy, donations facilitated their transport to and treatment within the United States, effectively forging indelible sympathetic links between the two nations. Tanimoto’s collaboration with Cousins was, in turn, mirrored by partnerships between American and Japanese donors and volunteers. For instance, Helen Yokoyama, herself a mediating figure as a Japanese American living in Japan, would accompany the maidens on their journey and, as their “den mother,” help ease the inevitably bumpy cultural transition. Receiving them in the United States were host families, Quakers who had volunteered to open up their homes to the women as retreats where they could convalesce between surgeries. In the United States, activists Mary and Bill Kochiyama facilitated meetings between the maidens and the Japanese American community.24 Additionally, though the maidens would receive treatment from a team of American plastic surgeons at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, in the spirit of transpacific partnership, they were also accompanied by three Japanese doctors, who benefited from the expertise of Drs. Arthur Barsky, William Hitzig, and Bernard Simon, while assisting in the operations when they could. That no less imposing a figure of militancy than the U.S. Air Force should volunteer to transport the maidens to the United States seemed, given the Occupation’s notoriously firm stance on the bomb’s necessity, the most eloquent expression of the healing spirit of rapprochement. As an initiative that sought to establish and maintain—with the exception of the Air Force’s donation—civilian ties of altruism between the United States and Japan, the project sought to obviate its political implications. Nevertheless, the ABCC’s director worried that the project might be perceived as “atonement for American guilt in dropping the bomb,” and the

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State Department expressed concerns about the diplomatic difficulties posed by the project. A series of memos reveal deep misgivings about the project’s ramifications. Officials cast their suspicious eyes on Cousins and Tanimoto, worrying whether the specter of communism lurked behind a façade of altruism, and only grudgingly granting approval on learning that, if the project was rejected, “the Russians might get to them first.”25 While such reservations clearly arose within a Cold War context, the State Department’s worry about pacifism’s politics tacitly raised the thorny issue of apology.26 Indeed, Walter C. Robertson noted that, though “helping victims of misfortune is a very worthwhile endeavour . . . every effort should be made to keep the project involving the Hiroshima girls from stirring up propaganda against nuclear weapons.”27 While antinuclear activism did not necessarily entail apology for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, clearly for Robertson and others in the State Department, the former often presupposed the latter.28 “Treatment” thus became a contested term whose shifting meanings served at times as the occasion for confronting, but more often for dodging, the fraught issue of reconciliation.

“Like a Gigantic Photographic Flash”: Exposing the Bomb’s Aftermath In Hiroshima, John Hersey likens the light of the bomb to a “gigantic photographic flash,”29 which one survivor sees reflected in a laboratory corridor. The questions posed by Japanese journalists and debated among American observers about the public dimensions of the project introduce another way of understanding this evocative metaphor: besides aptly describing the light’s brilliance and the heat’s unbearable thermal force, the analogy suggests the nuances of exposure. The “exposure” of atomic wounds was strictly screened so that representation of injury can itself be considered an act of resistance. The maidens’ introduction to the spotlight was, however, far from smooth. Publicity served simultaneously as a primary means of securing resources and the occasion for articulating the harshest doubts about the mission’s effectiveness. Rather than helping in the maidens’ repair, the flash of photography could end up further wounding them. The dual implications of exposure partially explain the ambivalences associated with the project’s unstated though unmistakable goal of reconciliation.The maidens’ introduction to the public eye began before their arrival in the United States. As David Serlin notes, journalists followed them about in Hiroshima as they prepared for their journey, filing short human interest stories that served the dual purpose of preparing U.S. audiences for the maidens’ American debut and of acclimating them to an intensifying spotlight.30 More tentative early approaches to the representation of the hibakusha

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only gradually were reversed and, in initial stages, some delicacy prevailed. When the maidens filed their visa applications, notably the State Department, “recogniz[ing] all the implications,” waived the usual requirements for passport photos.31 Though the implications were unspecified, one can surmise that this gesture took account of the maidens’ sensitivity toward the camera.32 After all, if the project’s aim was in part to repair the maidens’ self-images, it would doubtless be redundant, not to mention cruel, to capture already recognizable disfigurements on the document meant to facilitate this process. While the maidens were subjects of a monarchy, the principles of the passport and of the photographs conventionally attached to it nevertheless apply. While the photograph’s indexicality, its material connection to a referent, conferred to the passport image the legitimacy of truth, as Chapter 1 showed, doubts about the accuracy of this truth are perceptible in widespread strictures that dictate virtually all its formal elements.33 From the distance of the camera, its angle, and lighting conditions, to the expression of the sitter (who is instructed to look directly forward without emotion), these bureaucratic demands on the details that make a photograph suitable for a passport suggest a lingering worry that, despite indexicality’s irrefutability, the subject or citizen is frustratingly impossible to represent. That the photograph, the key though unstable feature, should be absent suggests an obviation of the requirement of representation: the presentation of the maidens in itself, and by implication, of their disfigurement (surely what is meant by the euphemistic “all its implications”) is sufficient identifying verification. In this instance, it would seem this presentation precludes representation of the maidens. More startlingly, the basis of identification is the scar that mars the body so that this polite gesture of decorum, this act of civility, reverts to a wholly textual basis of documentation while at the same time implicitly relying on the body itself, specifically the scar, to furnish proof of self. Presumably, officials need only look at the body itself rather than at its image; in this formulation, the body would offer its own evidence. In this manner also, the maidens’ avoidance of the “flash” of photography, their ability to secure a passport without at the same time having to append a photograph, rendered them simultaneously invisible—beyond photography’s frame—and all the more visible, with their scars, as the basis for a tactful circumvention of the rules, serving as the site where the rules’ identifying mandate would be met. This decision rendered the maidens both familiar, insofar as their marked bodies are distinguishable, and foreign—they were of course granted access to, not embraced as citizens of, the United States. Additionally, the project assumed a discourse of sentiment in which participants readily internalized a rhetoric of adoption (of mothers and daughters) that hailed the maidens within the domestic national space,34 but stopped short of actually adopting them.35

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Instead, the prevailing rhetoric anticipates the principle of biological citizenship, in which a renewed recognition of life’s vitality is “to be negotiated in a whole range of practices of regulation and compensation.”36 What distinguishes the appeal to biological citizenship, in contrast, say, to the more familiar national conception of citizenship dominant since the French Revolution, is its grounding within the shared vulnerability of human embodiment, the frail condition that philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.”37 On this basis, one might add that biological citizenship is more amenable to human rights discourse, with its valuation of bare life, than with issues of territoriality and sovereignty associated with nationally bounded approaches to citizenship. By effectively embracing biological citizenship as a universalizing basis on which the maidens’ benefactors negotiated their presence within the United States and their transpacific journey, the project sought to sidestep potential reservations that their status as foreigners or, officially, noncitizens might arouse. Compared with the circumspect handling of their passport applications, the maidens’ public handling was considerably harsher. Strict instructions by Cousins and Tanimoto to the press for delicacy in questioning the maidens were flagrantly ignored. As soon as the maidens’ Air Force plane touched down, the press rushed forward with cameras in tow, eager to capture close up the extent of their injuries. The New York Star-Ledger featured a photograph of the maidens disembarking,38 and the New York Daily News highlighted the project’s affective dimensions by publishing a photograph of participant Hideko Sanimura attempting to cover her face as she broke down in tears during a public statement. Reporting for the story titled “Hiroshima Maids Here for Aid,”39 Theo Wilson implies that Sanimura’s withdrawal exemplifies the reserve shared by the group, whom he describes “trying to hide disfigured mouths with their hands.” Tellingly, Wilson notes the troubling reactions of greeters, presumably like him, who “stared without meaning to.”40 Despite the story’s subtle invocation of the etiquette of introduction, in which the maidens shy away from scrutiny, it is the reporters who most obviously breach unspoken rules of decorum. Though visual scrutiny of the maidens’ disfigurement was by now unabashedly direct, criticism of, not to mention expressions of regrets with respect to, its cause was by no means obvious, short of an allusion to “a sour note” added when representatives from a group calling itself the California Peace Council broached the welcoming committee in San Francisco asking to make a speech.41 Besides this brief reference, one would have to look diligently and read carefully to detect any hints of censure in response to the maidens’ arrival. Yet, considering that the Occupation had long sought to suppress the sight of wounded bodies by attending instead to the ruined landscape, scrutiny of the

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maidens in itself might effectively constitute covert criticism. Serlin observes that in their uniform characterization as victims whose abject state was unfailingly linked to the bomb, narratives about the maidens effectively functioned in this way, revealing precisely that which the Occupation long sought to suppress: the wounded body rather than the ruined landscape.42 Regret was nonetheless difficult to discern. In fact, the only overt reference was made by a maiden. Michiko Sako confessed to reporters that, on visiting Pearl Harbor, she “had a feeling of repentance. . . . The Japanese navy took the first step in the war. We, the survivors of Hiroshima, got a terrible destruction upon us, but we should have repentance rather than hatred.”43 To appreciate how remarkable Sako’s comments were, consider the more typical response to the issue of atonement offered in a letter to the editor written by one Roland R. Flynn. Though the letter is inspired by the release of the film Hiroshima—Ten Years Later, its sentiments, published only a few months after the maidens’ arrival, on August 14, 1955, could also apply to the project. In “Hiroshima Guilt,” Flynn praises the impulse to feel sympathy as a “humanitarian gesture” but cautions against offering any “measure of ‘atonement.’” To one of the victims represented in the film, Flynn extends “regrets and sympathy . . . but never apologies.” Indeed, such sentiments were widespread. Within this context, Sako’s confession of “repentance” for Pearl Harbor is all the more striking, suggesting a subtle yet significant distinction between atonement and repentance. As such, the confession offers an acceptable way of addressing an issue that otherwise tended to receive short shrift, precisely because the burden of contrition passed from the sites of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Pearl Harbor, from American to Japanese consciences. When the theme of reconciliation received airtime on television in a live episode of the popular show This Is Your Life, however, for a brief, stunning moment, it appeared as though the burden of contrition shifted once again, from the Japanese back to the American consciences that had long rejected it. Hosted by Ralph Edwards, This Is Your Life first went on air in 1952, and its standard format of surprising celebrities with the story of their life (as told by other guests who played key roles in its unfolding) proved to be a hit with audiences. By 1955 not only had the show attracted a loyal following; it had also proven successful in soliciting public support for philanthropic projects. In a bid to take advantage of the show’s national audience, Norman Cousins arranged for Reverend Tanimoto to appear in a special episode that was broadcast live on May 11, 1955, only two days after the project’s participants arrived in the United States. “This Is Your Life: Kiyoshi Tanimoto” began in the usual way, with Edwards announcing the day’s theme and promising that in the course of the show, audiences would be introduced to the “face of atomic power.” Tanimoto, whose celebrity was a somber departure from

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the ­entertainers who usually lit the stage, looked bewildered and flustered. Among the guests assembled for the show, Tanimoto’s wife, Chisaka, was the one toward whom he showed the most genuine warmth and undisguised pleasure. Given only days to prepare for her long trip to Los Angeles from Japan, Chisaka appeared on stage wearing a traditional kimono and was eventually joined by her four children. Though her attire might have struck viewers as being authentic, in fact she customarily wore Western-style clothing. Odder still was the fact that, though Edwards asked her questions about her experiences in the aftermath of the atomic explosion, Chisaka responded in Japanese without the visible or audible benefit of a translator, suggesting that the interview was partially scripted or that, while Chisaka understood English, her role was to signify, in dress as well as address, Japanese-ness. The femininity that underlined this representation of Japanese culture was even more apparent when juxtaposed against her husband’s apparent ease with English.44 In his suit and barely accented English, he functioned as a mediator or bridge of sorts, unifying the divide between the United States and Japan. Indeed, emphasis on Tanimoto’s theological training with American missionaries in Japan and at Emory University in the United States, in effect, domesticated a man who might otherwise be seen as a foreigner like his apparently exotic wife.45 The reunion between Tanimoto and his wife underscored the show’s overarching theme of unity, the climactic stakes of which were hinted at early in the camera’s occasional focus on a shadowy figure hidden behind a scrim. The words spoken by this figure set the specific if still mysterious scene, the momentous day of the attack on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, and invoked, in a seemingly penitent tone, God—the very figure to whom Tanimoto appealed in the bomb’s aftermath. To reinforce the sense of division that this shared faith was to overcome, a split-screen shot juxtaposed Tanimoto against the profile of a man who would shortly be identified as Robert Lewis, copilot (along with Paul Tibbets) of the infamous Enola Gay. Symbolically evoking divisions without immediately explaining reasons for them, the split screen visually established the crisis that the narrative’s theme of reunion sought to dissolve and thereby resolve. In short order, when the screen was raised, Lewis bounded forward in full view to reach out and stand next to the man whose life he had changed. At this charged moment, Lewis proceeded to recount his actions on that horrific day: Well, Mr. Edwards, uh, just before 8:15 a.m. Tokyo time, Tom Ferrebee— a very able bombardier—carefully aimed at his target, which was the second Imperial Japanese Army headquarters. At 8:15 promptly, the bomb dropped. We turned fast to get out of the way of the deadly radiation and bomb effects. First was the big flash that we got, and then

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the two concussion waves hit the ship. Shortly after, we turned back to see what had happened. And, there, in front of our eyes, the city of Hiroshima disappeared. I wrote down later, “My God, what have we done?”46 Tanimoto recoiled from Lewis. And though Lewis looked directly at a visibly discomfited Tanimoto as he described the events of August 6, 1945, the theme of his narrative is ambiguous, especially as it retains a martial emphasis, obvious in a precise timekeeping and, as Serlin astutely notes, in its focus on a military target without explicit acknowledgment of the human ones as well. Rather than offered as explanation to Tanimoto, the story is largely told in response to Edwards’s questions. Moreover, in its reliance on military mannerisms, Lewis’s story affirms the orders that he carried out, and only questions them with his invocation of God toward the end of his brief explanation. While Edwards sees this deferral to a higher power, which Tanimoto had also voiced in his response to the scene of Hiroshima’s devastation, as a powerful point of connection between the two men, this apparently shared faith establishes at best only a tenuous basis for reconciliation. After all, Lewis’s question does not wholly undermine the preceding statement and stops far short of a direct apology. Though regret is implicit in Lewis’s rhetorical question, at no point does he offer the words that unambiguously perform the speech act of apology, “I am sorry” or “I regret.”47 If Lewis’s words neither conveyed nor performed apology, his gestures perhaps suggest otherwise. As he recounted his reaction to the bombing, Lewis raised his hand over his face to wipe his brow, seemingly echoing Sanimura’s retreat from the camera. But whereas in her case, the gesture was perceived as feminine modesty, Lewis’s hinted at contrition. Did Lewis’s hand shield tears of regret from his eyes? Rodney Barker, the maidens’ biographer, was unconvinced, speculating that Lewis’s shakiness might have been the result of a drinking binge fueled by disappointment that he would not be as handsomely compensated as he had hoped for his guest appearance on the show.48 According to Ralph Edwards Productions, however, stories about Lewis’s inebriation are unlikely, since, with the exception of the “principal subject,” all guests of the show were required to remain on set throughout the day for readthrough and rehearsal and were “handled” very closely. Archivists at Ralph Edwards Productions attest that “there is also a dinner scheduled there, so as to prevent anyone from accidentally wandering off. At the end of the episode, Lewis presented the first check, on-cue, suggesting that he was well prepared. Finally, his visible discomfort could be in response to the bright, hot lights.”49 Indeed, Tanimoto’s daughter, Koko, disagreed with Barker’s theory, telling her interviewer in the documentary After the Clouds Lifted that on seeing what she

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thought were Lewis’s tears, her hatred for the man dissolved and she felt forgiveness instead. That these imperceptible tears should be the basis for Koko’s forgiveness is ironic given that she is the one who weeps most openly and visibly in the episode. Though the meaning of Lewis’s slight movement is debatable, the sight of Koko’s tears was obvious. Furthermore, the message the show sought to convey was clear: the exchange was meant to forge a rapprochement between victim and aggressor, Tanimoto and Lewis, the latter of whom was, however uncertain his gesture, shown as victim also. As significant as the tears that may or may not have been shed, however, is the handshake between Lewis and Tanimoto (Figure 3.2). An unmistakable sign of reconciliation’s well-meaning civility, the handshake marks the spatial, visual, and tactile bridging of division initially emphasized by the split-screen technique. Within Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theory of the “intertwining” of subject and object, the grasp of hands is the symbol for the imminent reversibility between an interior self and the exterior world (the other), in which flesh denotes the chiasmic enfolding of this embodied self.50 In this careful parsing of two forms of corporeality, the embodied self whose sensibility is made possible through the touch of the other and whose mutual implication is underscored by Merleau-Ponty’s neologism “intercorporeity,”51 the touch potentially “incorporates” (his apt term for enfolding) the other into the self. That the self cannot be fully incorporated into the other—this intertwining is imminent yet unrealizable for Merleau-Ponty—suggests the ethical necessity of maintaining a fundamental distance. On the stage of This Is Your Life, no such distance is observed, however; with the handshake, Tanimoto is symbolically enfolded into Lewis. In what amounts to a tacit violation of ethical distance, this gesture of civility turns out to be profoundly uncivil, a breach of the decorum that the handshake ostensibly respects. In this focus on the handshake, sign of male reconciliation, civility screens its uncivil implications. Civility’s uncivil dimensions are also evident when the show turned explicitly to its other concern, rehabilitation of female bodies. Unlike the firm grasp of hands between the two men, these bodies were shown as ungraspable. In contrast to the center stage occupied by Tanimoto and Lewis, two maidens (Takoya Minoya and Takaka Emore were selected to represent the group as a whole) appeared on the show wholly obscured. Undermining Edwards’s claim that this decision was meant to spare the maidens “embarrassment” from public exposure, however, was the fact that, although the maidens did not appear before the cameras, photographs of them and, more tellingly, of their scars did. The screen thus only served to magnify rather than to conceal the maidens’ wounds: their shadows were paradoxically titillating, maintaining rather than refuting the double-edged sword of exposure that, though enlisted for their salvation, nonetheless posed a threat to them. The effect of the show’s framing

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Figure 3.2  The handshake between Robert Lewis and Kiyoshi Tanimoto. (Still photograph taken from “This Is Your Life: Kiyoshi Tanimoto.” Courtesy of Ralph Edwards Productions.)

of civility was uncivil precisely because viewers were able to see—at the same time that producers were able to retain the moral high ground of not having to show fully—atomic power’s live “face”: the faces of the maidens who testified to its lingering effects. The gendered portrayal of these two types of victims, the men bound by God and the women bound by disfigurement, revealed the fact that while the episode aired in order to seek support for the project of repairing the bodies of the maidens, it was Tanimoto who played the part of emblematic survivor, all the more palatable because his body was unmarked. Not only should the body be unmarked by wounds; it should also be unthreatening—which, next to Lewis’s more sizable frame, Tanimoto’s diminutive stature most certainly

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appeared. As victim, Tanimoto was thus more acceptable than the scores of injured Japanese men, specifically the veterans who were conspicuously excluded from the project, precisely because his masculinity was unthreatening. Indeed, sitting among the audience were Japanese American parishioners whom he once served, whose presence in the studio not only helped develop the theme of reunion but also symbolized this domestication of foreignness. As framed by the show, ten years after the atomic bombings of Japan and after the official closing of the Japanese American internment camps, American popular culture could see that “This Is Your Life” in effect meant the inclusion of Japanese Americans in their daily lives. That surgeries sought to enhance movement and improve industry, goals that would also serve needy male hibakusha, whose status as victims might be challengeable on the basis of their link, however tenuous, with the aggression of war, reveals the significance of gender for this project, whose concern with femininity is suggested by the term “Hiroshima Maidens” itself. Though it is the unfortunate translation of a Japanese term describing their marital status, the gendered nature of the project thus could hardly be missed, and was only compounded by the fact that the maidens were also known as Keloid Girls, a term whose infantilizing emphasis heightened their vulnerability.52 Indeed, a poem titled “Smile, Please Come Back,” which was penned by one participant, conveyed the group’s hopes for happiness within recognizably feminine terms. Subsequently adapted into a single sung a cappella by the maidens, it was a best-selling hit when released in Japan. Not only did the smile here connote an affective release; it was also the sign of the body’s physical release from the pain associated with keloids. In contrast to the handshake, signifier of a masculine release from psychic injury, the smile was a sign of the body’s successful rehabilitation, which is to say, its return to femininity. That the show’s sponsor was Hazel Bishop long-lasting nail polish further established the difference between the maidens who appeared on stage and the “girls in the audience,” to which this product of the beauty industry was specifically pitched. Such a framing implicitly contrasted the damaged femininity of the shadowy forms hidden behind the screen with the wholeness of the girls addressed through the advertisement.53 Within this context, healing the scar was the means by which the wounded body’s femininity could be restored. Although the project hinged on plastic surgery’s reconstructive promise, its emphatic femininity thus also enlisted the aid of extramedical resources.54 Chief among these extramedical resources, as noted earlier, was the sentimental structure of symbolic adoption that framed the maidens’ stay in the United States. Moreover, between surgeries, the maidens were encouraged to attend professional training programs in trades such as dressmaking, design, aesthetics, secretary’s aide, and nurse’s aide, considered suitable for young women.

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Just as important, the reparative feminization of the maidens entailed lessons in civil conduct. In the course of preparing the women for their journey to the United States, Helen Yokoyama was charged with brokering cultural divides. She was especially concerned about taste in food and delicacy in manners, as many of the maidens’ deportment reflected their class background. As a Japanese American, then, Yokoyama’s role in the project was to domesticate these foreign bodies. As such, her participation marks a transition from the “enemy alien” status conferred onto Japanese Americans during World War II to mediator bridging the division between Japanese and American civilities. Notably, Barker describes Yokoyama’s disgust at watching them eat “like common laborers,” and explains that to a certain extent that was to be expected. After all, these girls were inexperienced and uneducated; they had been selected on the basis of their disfigurement, not their backgrounds, and most had lost homes and family members so their home training lacked the discipline and instruction in etiquette that were mandatory in a traditional Japanese household. That being the case, and knowing that soon they would be entering American homes as guests, Helen Yokoyama felt it was most important for them to have a standard of conduct to guide them in their daily interactions.55 To instill this standard in her charges, Yokoyama organized lessons in etiquette, comprehensive though informal primers that covered how to speak, walk, and eat politely. While seemingly insignificant details in the project’s larger framework, the manners that Yokayama sought to impart to the maidens constitute an inextricable part of its overarching concern with feminization. In this regard, comportment was the behavioral complement to surgery’s physical mandate: whereas plastic surgery sought physical release of the maidens’ trapped femininity, exercises in comportment—like the rhetoric of adoption, professional training, and lessons in etiquette—aimed for what was, effectively, the performance of femininity. Within the parameters of the project, this performance constituted civil conduct for subjects who were cast as exotic, though domesticable foreigners. Even when tragedy struck and one of the maidens, Tamako Nakabayashi, died of heart failure during a minor operation, this newly acquired decorum helped salvage an otherwise insurmountable crisis. Misako Kannabe, who was scheduled to be operated on next, insisted that no postponement or cancellation need be considered. Because Kannabe understood the multiple ways that failure might be construed at home and abroad, her submission to surgery unified the physical and behavioural components of

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femininity. In affirming plastic surgery’s efficacy despite painful evidence to the contrary, she attempted to redeem the project in the face of failure. In so doing, she acted as an exemplary maiden, a feminine example of courageous self-sacrifice, which was integral to the mandate of the project itself.56 The rhetoric of feminine beauty persisted even when a medical framing of the discourse of repair is explicit. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Principles and Practice of Plastic Surgery, a textbook Arthur Barsky coedited with Sidney Kahn and Bernard Simon (surgeons who also participated in the project), which featured three maidens—not named as such—who appear among the models illustrating the effects of radiation burns and, in a short series of photographs depicting successive surgeries, as exemplars of the reparative potential of procedures such as grafting and z-plasty.57 To the extent that illustrations have long been a staple of medical writing,58 the maidens’ inclusion within the textbook is unremarkable, consistent in function and framing with the numerous photographs of other graphic cases that also appear in the course of nearly eight hundred pages. These bodies function, like the other cases, as handy references, concretizing the methods and effects explained and described in the various chapters. In this sense, the color photographs helpfully illustrate the words they accompany, in a manner that at first blush seems more descriptive, objective, and less fraught than previous photographs of the maidens. A key difference, however, between news photos of the maidens and those that appeared in Barsky’s book is the plainly medical context. Whereas the news photographs sought to show the maidens’ scars, they ended up focusing much of the time on the maidens’ clothing and makeup as means of disguising, or at least minimizing, the scars that lingered. Despite descriptions of the photographers’ eagerness to capture up close the extent of the maidens’ injuries, most such photos employ a wider-angle view that showed the front torso. The medical photos end up doing what the news photographers are described as trying to do but what the photographs subsequently published in journals and magazines do not end up doing: they portrayed in detailed, extreme closeup the scars of the maidens’ faces. Three maidens ended up serving as case studies for purposes of medical exemplification, presented in a series of four to six color images meant to demonstrate improvement in the course of several surgeries. This serial arrangement suggests a narrative of progress, incorporating a now familiar practice of “before” and “after” framing, a standard of reform-centered photography.59 At first glance, the maidens appear no different than the other case studies in the textbook, which assumes that plastic surgery itself, though an imperfect specialty, can and, as the pictures demonstrate, often does have transformative effects. Though the maidens are not identified, the project’s enduring influence is nonetheless discernible, with the shadow of atomic injury delineated

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Figure 3.3  Details of reconstructive surgery, as shown in Barsky, Kahn, and Simon, Principles of Plastic Surgery.

through the arguably more neutral reference to “nuclear explosion.” The textbook’s handling of the effects of this kind of explosion on humans ably skirts political implications by outlining statistical figures in relation to Hiroshima. Notably, though this section includes photographs of radiation injuries, the maidens’ scars are not, it would seem, among them. Instead, the three maidens included in the textbook are dispersed elsewhere, suggesting an indirect handling of the kind of disaster and its fallout that the section on “Radiation Injury”60 otherwise addresses directly. In the first series, the frontispiece, as it were, of the textbook, a woman is shown in six images, and the text elaborates on the different procedures that culminate in “completed reconstruction.”61 The photographs focus on her face in the preoperative stages, her scars, and the pedicles that enable subsequent grafting, and the last two document the enhanced mobility (she opens her mouth) that results from the surgeries (Figure 3.3). While the photographs maintain a consistent, largely frontal focus on the face, there are subtle, though still perceptible, changes in composition: though she looks toward the camera throughout, in the last two especially she appears to meet the lens’s gaze directly, in seeming recognition of the prospective surgeons who are her viewers. Striking in these stages is the smile in the fifth image, a notable contrast with the expressionless face captured in the previous photographs and unusual among those included throughout the textbook. It is as if the wishes of the song “Smile, Please Come Back” could finally be realized thanks to surgery. Despite the clinical setting, the woman poses as if for a portrait, with the smile proving not only surgical success (enabling the otherwise restricted lips and mouth to move) but also the patient’s response, her approval and embrace of this success.

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Figure 3.4  Detail of unnamed Hiroshima Maiden shown in Plate 2 of Barsky, Kahn, and Simon, Principles of Plastic Surgery.

While demonstrating the efficacy of surgical intervention, the smile—so longingly evoked in the maidens’ hit song—also disrupts, in a sense, the strictly medical framing of this face. To appreciate how startling this smile is, consider the portrayal of a second maiden (not shown here), whose representation is more consistent with the textbook’s overall depiction of bodies in strictly medically illustrative terms. Instead of focusing on an affective response to medical intervention, the camera attends exclusively to sites on the body that would be the object of the surgeon’s professional regard. In Figure 3.4, another maiden’s injuries are given full description as “cicatricial ectropion of the left upper and lower eyelids, the result of a thermal burn caused by nuclear explosion.”62 The four pictures associated with the series document different stages in her treatment, beginning with preoperative condition (shown as a “head shot”), followed by an extreme close-up of the affected eye and release of the lower lid, and ending with a return to the head shot, in a pose that echoes the first picture so as to highlight more dramatically the difference between the faces—that is, between injury and treatment. While at first glance it may seem redundant to have two “after” images in this series of four photographs illustrating progressive stages of treatment (as with the illustration of other “models” in the textbook, one would usually have sufficed), it is necessary to demonstrate the movement of the lid that the still pictures could not otherwise show. Besides the reconfigured eye, the patient’s blink, shown in the last two images, is evidence of the scalpel’s success. The photographs purport to document the process of the surgeries, which address the problem of lid adhesion, and the patient’s progress, through a serial staging that demonstrates the liberation of the eye, which is evident through a stilled blink. These photographs are extraordinary, then, because they graphically show the medical efficacy of repair—evidence that the mission, even if not explicitly named, was successful—while at the same time reverting to communicative codes in excess of medicine. The smile and the second maiden’s blink suggest a feminizing approach to treatment, an apprehension that the body offered

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up for repair is first and foremost a gendered one. Indeed, this assumption is affirmed by the fact that, as with other women who appear in the textbook, the “after” image is enhanced with cosmetics. The smiling woman wears bright red lipstick, as does the second woman, whose eyebrows, shown in their distorted and singed preoperative condition, are tattooed or drawn on in pleasing, symmetrical fullness. Additionally, the maidens wear foundation and powder to even out skin tone and obscure any remaining scars. On the one hand, the representation of the repaired body is fully consistent with the textbook’s emphasis on the potential of plastic surgery to restore the body’s function and features, so that these feminine enhancements, in underscoring the surgeon’s success, affirm the message of medical efficacy. On the other hand, the makeup can also be seen as unconscious admission of the surgeon’s limitations: he cannot make hair regrow nor can he wholly smooth scar-puckered skin. The textbook can be seen, accordingly, as a bookend of sorts for understanding the development of the intertwined issues, treatment strategies and approaches to repair in the postwar period. In its careful maintenance of the shield of medical objectivity, it affirms the ABCC’s detached scientific scrutiny. And yet in these moments that rupture, ever so slightly, this guise, the textbook serves as the ABCC’s foil. Attentive to its case studies’ emotional responses, as briefly portrayed in accompanying illustrations, the textbook does not treat the wounded body as simply an object for medical scrutiny. Although it includes some of the Hiroshima Maidens as examples of thermal burns and radiation injury, the textbook also exceeds the framework of the project itself. Indeed, by the 1960s, when the textbook was published, organizers of the project had long acknowledged its limited scope even as they congratulated themselves on its greater success of drawing international attention to the plight of the hibakusha. The maidens’ scars were, after all, always meant to serve as spectacular examples of the need for repair that extended far beyond the twenty-five who were, effectively, its spokeswomen and models. While these photographs are offered as cases of surgery’s reparative possibilities, at the same time they also demonstrate the multiple valences of “repair.” Although repair requires medical treatment, the process also exceeds the surgeon’s scalpel, encompassing a broader constellation of cultural resources, including the enhancements offered by the beauty industry and the humanitarianism of altruistic civility. More troublingly, while repair serves as a means of approaching the aftermath of war, as the next sections will show, it also helped obscure an even more pressing issue: reparation. What was clear when the project ended was that the transpacific network it had forged would need to be altered. No longer was it feasible to bring the wounded to the United States; instead, the commitment to repair branched outward. As Serlin argues, doctors in Japan were trained in the latest plastic

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surgery techniques and, as a consequence, the specialization, once frowned on as an indulgence of the prosperous, flourished in Asia. For all these intertwined resonances of repair, whether taking altruistic, medical, or cosmetic forms, the political dimensions of reparation when it came to addressing the wounded bodies of Hiroshima was an issue that continued to haunt such compensatory gestures.

Hiroshima Maidens, Napalm Girl Debates in the United States about appropriate moral and political remedies for the outcome of American foreign policy decisions in Asia returned to the spectacle of wounded, childlike femininity in an unmistakable way. The complex “treatment” of the Hiroshima Maidens, with its ambivalent and even contradictory medical and extramedical implications, similarly characterizes that of the so-called Napalm Girl. Though the connection between these two cases through medical philanthropy has been noted in passing by historians, few have observed their shared attentiveness to the wounds of war, not to mention their contribution to informal missions of reconciliation. The sequence of events on June 8, 1972, in Trang Bang is by now well known, recounted by the photographers and journalists who traveled from Saigon that day to report on what they thought would be a typically minor, but still newsworthy, firefight. Kim Phuc and her family had sought refuge inside a nearby temple. They were waiting out a skirmish between fighters from the North and South and were nearly in the clear when suddenly a soldier who took in a radio call informing them that planes were mistakenly targeting the temple and surrounding areas ordered all of them to run for cover. As members of the family fled in groups, canisters of napalm hit the ground,63 and intense flames immediately blanketed the area.64 Standing in the perimeter, the stunned photographers were horrified by what next unfolded. Emerging from the thick smoke was first Kim Phuc’s aunt, who carried in her arms her baby, whose skin hung from his limbs like charred clothing. An ITN film crew recorded her horror, pain, and grief. Kim Phuc emerged from the flames shortly afterward behind her brother and other cousins crying in Vietnamese, “too hot, too hot.” Nick Ut’s award-winning photograph captures her wrenching scream (see Figure 3.1). Along with other photographs singled out by the World Press Photo and Pulitzer Prize for distinction, including Eddie Adams’s picture of the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner and Malcolm Browne’s picture of a self-immolating monk, Trang Bang, 1972 is credited with galvanizing the antiwar movement.65 Critical to the photograph’s testimonial power is its framing. While others took similar pictures, Ut’s was unique in its direct, frontal perspective of the

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girl’s pain. Kim Phuc stands out as the only naked person, her pain magnifying the suffering of those who surround her. Moreover, the powerful testimony of the suspended scream is poignant because its source, a child, makes her appear even more vulnerable.66 The Associated Press, in effect, acknowledged as much. Since its policy against publishing photographs with full frontal nu­dity posed a potential problem for editor Horst Faas, who worried that the pic­ture would be suppressed, a solution focused on emphasizing Kim Phuc’s innocence. A technician was instructed to remove shadows suggesting pubic hair, thereby obscuring any hint of sexuality, not to mention any sign of maturity. In this regard, Kim Phuc’s “girlness” was, as Nancy K. Miller persuasively argues, clearly significant, for, as the Hiroshima Maidens project revealed, fragile femininity was an effective way of enlisting humanitarian support for medical philanthropy.67 This childlike femininity makes her more moving than others within the picture, who could, however remotely, be linked with a less acceptable martial masculinity, like her brother (who, in the ITN recording, is heard cursing the bomb), or, especially the soldiers and journalists in the background, who are protected by military accoutrements such as helmets, flak jackets, and camouflage fatigues. But, as Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites point out, the handling of the photograph was informed by conventions of civility. Although Kim Phuc’s nakedness offended rules of decorum, this incivility in turn exposed a greater incivility, the transgressions of war, which, Hariman and Lucaites observe, “by its nature is a violation of civility, normalcy, civic order.”68 Accordingly, the visual record of war, they contend, necessarily seeks to resolve the “internal tension between propriety and transgression.”69 A near reversal of the ways that civility marked the representation of the Hiroshima maidens, in which civility obscured the uncivil dimensions of medical philanthropy, the uncivil exposure of Kim Phuc’s body directly exposed a greater incivility. If the exposure of the bodies of Kim Phuc and the Hiroshima Maidens was by turns civil and offensively uncivil, this oscillation indexed the uncivil conditions and conduct that were the causes of their wounds. Like the photographs of the Hiroshima Maidens, which drew attention and subtly solicited sympathy for the project, the photograph of Kim Phuc aroused a powerful and enduring affective response, most immediately by the photographers themselves. After exhausting his rolls of film, Nick Ut ensured that Kim Phuc and other victims were driven to a hospital in Saigon. Shortly afterward, other journalists facilitated her transfer to a specialized clinic to ensure that she would receive treatment with the only plastic surgeons in Vietnam with sufficient resources and expertise to handle the massive traumatic injuries she had sustained. In fact, the clearest connection between the

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Napalm Girl and the Hiroshima Maidens can be traced to this clinic, which was organized in support of and in direct consequence of the ideal of transpacific altruism that the earlier project had introduced. More than a decade after the project’s end—during the time when Principles and Practice of Plastic Surgery presumably was being used to train a new generation of doctors—philanthropic medical intervention can be seen as the most obvious, though surprisingly overlooked, continuation of this earlier transpacifism. A clear link can be discerned, for example, in the ambitions of Tomin Harada, one of the Japanese surgeons who accompanied the maidens on their transpacific journey. His memoir, Hiroshima Surgeon, recounts his medical experiences during the war, participation in the project, and initiatives beyond it.70 Besides seeking to redeem Japan by returning to the nation the responsibility of healing the hibakusha, he sought a new role for Japanese surgeons abroad, namely to offer treatment to victims of the Vietnam War as the Hiroshima Maidens project had done for atomic bomb victims years earlier. While motivated by altruism, Harada’s activism can be seen in the context of the unacknowledged but nevertheless simmering rivalry between American and Japanese medical expertise, one of the still largely untold stories of the project. By extending a helping hand to the Vietnamese, Japanese doctors would be active healers rather than associated with the passive victims requiring tutelage and treatment. Moved by stories of mass injuries as a result of widespread napalm attacks, Harada traveled to Saigon in 1967 to put his plan into action. Nonetheless, when Harada visited Saigon he discovered that, officially at least, civilians were untouched by the flames of napalm. Despite witnessing firsthand massive burns on the orphans he visited during his trip, this denial of civilian injury was consistently repeated. Military officials insisted that, contrary to stories published by reporter Martha Gellhorn71 and disseminated by the nongovernmental organization Terre des Hommes, not a single burn victim required the services that he offered. During one such interview with Major General Humphreys, he directly asked whether rumors that napalmed children were being taken to U.S. military hospitals were true. Humphreys, Harada recounted, dismissed such stories by saying, “I would really like to see such a patient, but I haven’t been able to find any.”72 As the meeting wrapped up, Dr. Barsky joined them, but in a stunning omission that speaks volumes about U.S.-Japanese medical rivalry, what Dr. Barsky was doing in Vietnam and what he ended up doing on behalf of Vietnamese civilians are left out of Harada’s narrative. In fact, Dr. Barsky, lead surgeon in the Hiroshima Maidens project, was in Vietnam for the same reason Harada was. Unlike Harada, however, the project with which he was now associated focused on exchange of expertise rather .

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than transport of victims. While the Hiroshima surgeon returned to Japan to arrange for the treatment of select charges, Barsky remained in Vietnam to establish at Cho Ray Hospital in Saigon the Center for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, or what was to become known as the Barsky Unit. While one can only speculate why Barsky succeeded where Harada did not, his credentials as an eminent American surgeon, which likely held more sway with U.S. military officials than Japanese affiliations, his association with the newly formed philanthropic organization Children’s Medical Relief International (CMRI)—cofounded with the help of then twenty-eight-year-old lawyer and former Peace Corps volunteer Tom Miller—and his partial funding by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) could only have helped. At first glance, public funding through the auspices of USAID seemed to imply that the Barsky Unit received official endorsement, as the Hiroshima Maidens project’s ability to secure an Air Force plane for transpacific travel seemed to do. But as with the earlier project, the official position on the more recent mission was fraught at best. Miller speculates that “having the children treated in Vietnam, rather than the United States, where grotesquely burned war victims were being brought for treatment, seemed much better to the White House.”73 Besides Dr. Barsky’s participation, this philanthropic approach to treatment in Vietnam thus shares other similarities with its precursor. Its emphasis on care for children retained the project’s focus on the bodies of the most vulnerable (while dropping its exclusive concern with wounded female bodies) and enabled application of policy that was uneasily tolerated and grudgingly supported by officials while skirting the issue of apology, which remained politically volatile. The Barsky Unit offered repair in a context in which reparation appeared unthinkable. If this ideal had not been wholly tarnished when the Hiroshima Maidens project officially ended, neither had ambivalences about the discourse of repair been fully resolved. By 1968, the U.S. military could no longer sustain the fiction that civilians were unaffected by napalm strikes in the wake of Gellhorn’s devastating exposés. The Barsky Unit was established in 1969 and served its dual mandate, providing treatment to wounded children and training to Vietnamese doctors and nurses in techniques of plastic surgery so that such treatment could be self-sufficiently offered upon the departure of foreign aid. Although the former service was offered, the hasty evacuation of doctors with the fall of Saigon in 1975 meant that the latter aim remained unfulfilled.74 During its six years of operation, however, the Barsky Unit treated an average of twelve thousand patients a year, the average age of whom was eight. These patients were children who were wounded either directly because of the war, requiring skin grafts for napalm burns, for instance, or indirectly as a consequence of wartime deprivations, their disfigurements and congenital

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deformities resulting from malnutrition. A clear set of protocols, moreover, were established for treatment: doctors traveled to ten regional screening clinics in South Vietnam to select and retrieve patients who were brought to Saigon, where they prepared for surgery in a 120-bed reception center. When their strength was built up, they were transferred to the 54-bed Barsky Unit, where the operation was completed.75 Through the urging of photojournalists, who petitioned for Kim Phuc’s transfer, and the graces of Dr. My, a Vietnamese surgeon who overrode admissions policies, the Barsky Unit was where she ended up in 1972. Within this context, Ut’s regard for Kim Phuc’s pain unified photojournalism’s documentary focus with the altruistic ends of medical philanthropy. It is no surprise that his photograph would continue to serve these ends. Indeed, Tom Miller recalls its significance in raising support for CMRI after 1972: Once, when I was lobbying Senators to back the hospital after USAID threatened to cut funds when it became clear it was not achieving its political goal of stopping wounded children from being sent to the U.S., I was confronted by a member of the Washington Press who angrily told me the photograph I was showing of Kim Phuc’s injuries was a “fraud” and that the incident never happened. We used those and other photographs to raise private money and concern over the war, and were helped by many people in New York, such as Yoko Ono who pulled the photographs out when she was being interviewed on television.76 On the other hand, the longstanding fascination with Kim Phuc’s scars invokes the duality of exposure that marked representation of the Hiroshima Maidens. If the photograph is widely understood as a plea for rescue that focused on the plight of wounded children, it is ironic that for Kim Phuc the photograph that exposed the moment of her injuries also inadvertently made her vulnerable to political machinations that extended beyond the war’s end. Photojournalism would play an instrumental role in representing and thereby assuaging her suffering—while often at the same time unwittingly contributing to it. Follow-up stories on the war’s anniversary illustrated this predicament, in which exposure of wounding risked compounding injury. Perhaps the most pow­ erful of these “after” images is Perry Kretz’s photo essay in the German maga­ zine Stern, which appeared several years after the surrender of Saigon, demon­ strating that concern with the plight of this emblematic war victim reached far beyond the scope of the United States and Vietnam, the nations central to her story. Kim Phuc appears in these photographs as a shy, contemplative

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Figure 3.5  Portrait of Kim Phuc included in the photo essay published in Stern magazine. (Courtesy of Perry Kretz.)

girl, in contrast with the wide-mouthed anguish of the earlier photograph (Figure  3.5). Markedly different from Nick Ut’s picture, which only hinted at, without actually showing, her scars was Kretz’s sustained focus on them. Betraying a measure of reserve, Kim Phuc poses with part of her back bare, revealing puckered skin, the scars that are constant reminders of her napalm burns. Despite this central difference, Kretz maintains striking connections with the 1972 photograph. Although her body turns slightly away from the camera, her eyes maintain the direct gaze of the earlier photograph. Just as important, Kim Phuc’s nakedness (while not frontal) underscores her fragility. By representing her body in this way—naked and wounded—Kretz explicitly evokes not just the physical violence that caused the wounding but also the scopic violence that subsequently exposes and arguably replicates this wounding. And

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while his purposes may be in the service of a humanitarian regard for the vulnerability of bare life—civility in its most affective forms—they are served nevertheless through uncivil techniques.77 In so doing, Kretz most directly links his photograph with the one taken by Ut. In their linkage of these two forms of violence, depending as they do on the exposure of the naked and wounded female body, these atrocity photographs exemplify the “oriental obscene,” which Sylvia Chong theorizes as a “phantasmatic, visual presence that dominates the American cultural imaginary in the absence of an Asian American political collectivity that can speak for itself,” 78 a process of subjection that depends on the spectacle of violence for rhetorical and discursive purposes. The representation of Kim Phuc in photography thus can be seen to shift uneasily between the competing interests of, on the one hand, humanitarian concern and, on the other hand, exploitation. Far from being easily separable, the two are at times uncomfortably inextricable. Not only did these uneasily entwined motivations compel Kim Phuc’s seemingly perpetual enactment of the role of victim; they also required constant emphasis on her fragility. This pose and the often politicized compulsion to exposure were not confined to Kretz’s photo essay but would prove to be a persistent theme, demonstrating the ongoing fascination with the sight of Kim Phuc’s scars and their enduring symbolism of suffering and survival. Kim Phuc became a living exhibit trotted out by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV): the scars that knotted her back and were discreetly concealed with clothing but helpfully revealed with prompting provided evidence of U.S. atrocity. At the same time, her public appearance offered support for the claim of improvement under communist rule,79 ironically broadcast through the well-meaning agency of a Western “free” press, such as Stern magazine. Having identified her as victim of war and symbol of suffering, the famous photograph framed Kim Phuc in a role from which she seemed unable to escape. Perhaps the most intriguing picture of progress was a portrait of her holding a baby, which was taken during a visit to an elementary school in Ho Chi Minh City. (This photograph is not, to my knowledge, currently in circulation, and I have been unable to locate it.) Described in Denise Chong’s biography, the photograph, apparently widely circulated in Vietnam during the 1980s, included the caption “Kim Phuc posed with her daughter,” a descriptor that Kim Phuc insists is a lie that was personally painful because she was at the time unmarried and this picture’s implications were scandalous.80 That the photograph was staged makes it all the more provocative, as the fantasy it invokes is strikingly similar to the discourse marking the maidens’ relationship to their wounds. While the rhetoric of adoption, which also marked the relationship between Kim Phuc and benefactors like “Uncle Ut” and “Papa Kretz,”

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is in keeping with Vietnamese conventions of honorific address, it thus helps map out a broader ideological field in which the shift of role from daughter to mother is meant to symbolize progress. Invoking this now familiar rhetoric, Kim Phuc’s maternal role, despite being scripted, helped symbolically justify and redeem a patriarchal state as visual “evidence” of concern for the health and future of its wounded citizens. The equivocal terms of Kim Phuc’s relationship with visual culture remained relatively unchanged even when she did manage to “escape” from Vietnam. Notably, Chong’s biography about her opens by dramatizing the visual violence that disrupts Kim Phuc’s attempt to establish a new life as an immigrant in a working-class neighborhood in Toronto. The intrusion of the paparazzi, who broke the story of her defection to the West during a stopover in Newfoundland, Canada, after honeymooning in Moscow with her new husband, convinced Kim Phuc of the impossibility of anonymity. It would seem that her image—and the stories, whether of victimization or reconstruction, that it was meant to corroborate—were still enthralling in the double sense of inspiring fascination while imprisoning the subject of this attention. Yet, if in the photographs and photo essays from the 1970s and 1980s she appeared as victim soliciting support and sympathy, on her defection in the 1990s, images of her served slightly different purposes. From an emphasis on repair, as mediated through medical philanthropy in uneasy alignment with state propaganda, they instead shifted conspicuously in focus to forgiveness. Nowhere is this more evident than in the photo essay that appeared in a 1995 issue of Life magazine. Among the photos selected to illustrate the story of her flight to freedom in the West, one widely reproduced picture stands out. Depicting Kim Phuc cradling her firstborn son within her arms, the photograph, as many viewers have noted, emphasizes the stark contrast between the smoothness of the baby’s skin and the rough puckering that mars the mother’s (Figure 3.6). Whereas the pathos of Ut’s 1972 photograph derives from the frontal nudity of its central figure showing Kim Phuc as a child, the more recent portrait marks her transformation, while visually echoing the reverse gaze of Kretz’s photograph. Frequently juxtaposed against Ut’s iconic image, however, the Life photograph functions as the “after” that highlights the progress achieved since the “before” period depicted by its predecessor. The child once known as Napalm Girl has become, in turn, mother, who tenderly nurtures, protects, and watches over her own child. This composition, which underscores the peaceful repose of the child and the contentment of the mother who, in turn, rests her gaze upon the softness of his unmarked body, upholds the healing function of the scar, shifting emphasis from its previously more frequent association with wounding.81 Indeed, Joe McNally, the photographer who took the award-winning

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Figure 3.6  Phan Thi Kim Phuc and Son. (Photo by Joe McNally (Life ). Joe McNally/ Life/Getty Images.)

portrait, was, like Perry Kretz, keen to show the scar: “I knew I needed to see the scarring—otherwise there would be no touch point to the original photograph.”82 However, McNally’s keenness to establish a “touch point,” a telling phrase that underscores the tactile dimensions of affect,83 through the scar is ironic. After all, the 1972 photograph does not actually expose any scars or visible signs of injury (the pain in response to this injury is instead powerfully expressed

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through the frozen, anguished scream). In his misrecognition of the original photograph, McNally’s emphasis on scarring as the touch point between the two bodies in the past and in the present denotes what Roland Barthes has famously described as photography’s punctum,84 which is defined variously in Camera Lucida as a “stigmatum,”85 “this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces,” as well as a “sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice . . . that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”86 Although McNally’s search for the touch point identifies the scarring as the source of the punctum, his misrecognition underscores the importance—the overdetermination—of the scar as a site for wounding and healing in postwar representations of this body. Significantly, Kim Phuc’s own fraught relationship with this photograph of her, appropriately negotiated within visual culture, offers a slightly different definition of the “touch point.” At several galleries that display McNally’s portrait of her, Kim Phuc has in turn been photographed touching this photograph. The press photographs of this encounter suggest that although she avoids conflating the body’s wound with the wounding effect of photography, as McNally arguably does, the touch point for Kim Phuc is located in the scarred hand—which is shown literally touching the smooth image of her baby’s hand. Although this laying on of a maternal hand appears different in form from the intertwining of the gentlemanly handshake, this gesture nevertheless draws on civility as the basis for its wordless call for the healing balm of reconciliation. McNally’s Life portrait also evokes an image that few, if any, outside Vietnam have seen: the school photograph described in Denise Chong’s biography.87 Unsurprisingly, the Life portrait of Kim Phuc holding her son draws on precisely the pietà conventions that this earlier image appears to do. Juxtaposed against its renounced and now unseen precursor, the Life photograph exposes the ideology while at the same time affirming its importance, with the crucial difference that freedom—which the subject seizes—is marked through not only her willingness but also her decision to pose for a scene whose veracity she need not dispute. In both photographs motherhood is sign of progress and reconciliation, with the chief difference being that, in the more recent one, these qualities are not merely staged. If the earlier photograph, as a projection of the state’s fantasy of ideological rehabilitation, is a lie, the later one celebrates its liberating achievement. While little seems to have changed formally in the framing of her image, Kim Phuc’s participation in this more recent framing is profoundly different, for she effectively contributes to and actively constructs the narrative of reconciliation in contrast to this earlier emphasis on rehabilitation. However troubling this narrative of reconciliation may be, the difference between the girl in the photograph and the woman who chooses to

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be photographed is one that she has explicitly remarked on as being of signal importance, reflecting that “I want to stop being quiet.”88 Unsurprisingly, in Kim Phuc’s much publicized appearance at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial around that same year, reconciliation was an important theme. A visit that coincided with Veterans Day, the event, which had decidedly personal dimensions, could not help but take on unmistakably political implications. For instance, her meditations at the Vietnam Wall, a thoughtful repose shared by many visitors to the monument and a rite typical of pilgrimages to the capital, was subject, in turn, of further meditation on the import of this moment. What does it mean for Vietnam’s most recognizable survivor to confront the reflective granite bearing the names of America’s Vietnam War casualties? What does it mean that this survivor, now a proud Canadian citizen, is no longer a Vietnamese subject, and yet cannot speak within the framework of U.S. citizenship either? Is she still a victim if she dispenses forgiveness? In her address, Kim Phuc stresses the necessity of forgiveness, in the idealistic sense that Derrida symptomatizes as the philosophical limit-case in his reflections “On Apology,” to be conferred on even the most unforgivable of actions. If she were to meet the bomber, she says, “I would forgive him,” a wish that can be seen as recasting the forced, awkward encounter between Reverend Tanimoto and Robert Lewis. Whereas Tanimoto did not desire such a meeting, and indeed recoiled from the reunion, it was clear that this was precisely how Kim Phuc understood her address, not to mention her presence at this most symbolic of veterans’ sites. We return, then, to the moving encounter with which this chapter began, between Kim Phuc and Reverend John Plummer. That war veteran Plummer should seek special forgiveness for the part he might have played in the war suggests that he, if not others watching and listening to her, shared this view. Once in desperate need of repair, Kim Phuc offers her scars, conspicuous symbols of healing, as sign of reparative possibility. With the healing balm of forgiveness as her inspiration, enabling her to frame herself now as empowered ambassador of peace and reconciliation, Kim Phuc cannot be considered a victim any longer, or at least a victim in the ways that she once was. One question lingers: Why is Kim Phuc’s message of forgiveness not controversial in the way that Plummer’s solicitation of forgiveness proved to be? An explanation can be found in the special role this exemplary victim plays in redeeming her “aggressors,” who had, in the wake of their rejection after the humiliation of defeat, in turn, been cast in the role of victims. In other words, while her fragile femininity is called on to bear the burden of victimhood, the relief that attends this role is reserved for a special cast of victims and a unique category of wounding, the veterans and specifically their embattled masculinity. The spectacle thus performed and broadcast before a national

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audience inevitably cast this reconciliation, defined at this powerful moment as shared grief over the wounds of war, within national terms. Kim Phuc’s tearful address, in other words, can be seen as the basis for the renewal of national affect, conspicuously focused on relief for the wounds of its veterans. Moreover, unlike many critics of the wall who lament the incompleteness of its list of losses (notably, it accounts for only American, not Vietnamese, deaths), implying that the story of suffering is only partially told, Kim Phuc’s emphasis on the shared burden of sorrow, not to mention the mutual task of peace activism, transcends the circumscribed parameters of claims for recognition. Indeed, Kim Phuc recalls her experiences at the wall as “emotional,”89 suggesting that they constitute a primarily affective engagement that cannot be bound by national affiliation or political entanglement. After all, unlike the diva citizen whose pilgrimage to the national mall is, in Lauren Berlant’s theory of public intimacy,90 integral to her demand for political reckoning, Kim Phuc’s powerful presence in this space confounds tricky divisions between personal and political dimensions of affect. In other words, although this spectacle invokes the form of diva citizenship, the figure at its center attempts to avoid, perhaps futilely, the overt politicization that is its content. As a naturalized Canadian, she also can only uneasily, if at all, inhabit the role of citizen. If the unmistakably “national” dimensions of Kim Phuc’s pilgrimage are not introduced by her, they are an overdetermined feature of the framing of national monuments, made especially poignant surely because, to paraphrase Anne Anlin Cheng’s evocative formulation, this grief does not spill over into grievance.91 She came not to blame, but to mourn, a message that attracted an approving audience because, as noncitizen without any claim to redress, she offered dispensation for U.S. citizens. Hariman and Lucaites similarly remark on the “surrogacy” afforded by Kim Phuc’s Canadian citizenship as a felicitous bridge between domestic subject and foreigner that includes the United States without directly drawing it into the narrative of reconciliation she introduces.92 Here, in this uneasy divide, Kim Phuc is able to find a place in a manner akin to the Hiroshima Maidens, domesticated foreigners who came before her, precisely because this place is temporary and not wholly “national.”93

American Redress, Foreign Wounds Because the process of reconciling the wounds of the Vietnam War has long focused on the urgency of repair for Americans, it is perhaps unsurprising that scant attention should be paid to the issue of reparation when it comes to the injuries of the Vietnamese. Accordingly, the most vivid articulation of the discourse of repair is found not within any official pronouncements but rather in

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the form of litigation. In addressing veterans’ grievances, debates highlighted the injurious effects of Agent Orange rather than napalm in a sequence of events that focused on corporate responsibility. If the state would not acknowledge directly the possibility of apology for this violent past, then it was time to make the case against corporations.94 The historic toxic tort case undertaken on behalf of veterans sought to hold chemical companies and the government (whose contracts they fulfilled) accountable for the injuries, which they alleged were the consequence of exposure to Agent Orange. Doing so in a climate that eschewed the legitimacy of such claims and when the state itself shied away from extending apologies for these cases, presented unique challenges. Agent Orange was one of many chemical concoctions deployed as part of a strategy of herbicidal warfare intended to expose guerrillas who had managed to secure an advantage by staging attacks through dense jungles. Although these chemicals were meant to strip the jungles of their canopy, they also caused illness among those exposed to sprayed sites, according to the lawsuit. Veterans claimed that Agent Orange, named for the color-coded strip that wound around the drums that contained these chemicals, was toxic and led to numerous health complications including various cancers, respiratory illnesses, fertility complications, and birth defects. Although the government ultimately managed, through complex legal tactics, to avoid being named in the lawsuit, seven chemical companies, including the Monsanto and Dow corporations, eventually settled with the claimants for $180 million in 1985, then the largest award of its kind. The settlement seemed the best, if not the perfect, compromise. While the defendants had hoped to prevail on the basis of attacks on claims of causality—injuries such as cancers and birth defects were not, according to conflicting scientific reports and studies, specific to Agent Orange exposure—and through recourse to the government contract defense, a strategy that piggybacked on the government’s invocation of the hoary and bitterly contested principle of sovereign immunity, they also wanted to avoid a trial and a potentially punitive award by a jury, which seemed likely at a time of widespread sympathy for the plight of the veterans. For their part, veterans received compensation, which though small (and certainly not the day in court that some relished) was symbolic recognition of their suffering. As Peter H. Schuck puts it: The veterans viewed the case as their opportunity to settle accounts, to recover from the government and the chemical manufacturers some portion of what the Vietnam War had taken from them in the name of duty: their youth, their vigor, and their future. The case came to symbolize their most human commitments and passions: their insistence upon respect and recognition, their hope for redemption and renewal,

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and their hunger for vindication and vengeance. For them, it was a searing morality play projected onto a national stage.95 In his opinion, Judge Weinstein acknowledged the importance of the “mythic, symbolic view”96 for the trial, noting that many of the plaintiffs sued “not for money but for public vindication.”97 Meanwhile, the chemical companies were spared the expense of a much larger award, while still able to exonerate themselves behind the clause, characteristic of such settlements, that explicitly denies responsibility for injury. For all its continued controversy, the Agent Orange settlement is widely acknowledged as a case for political accountability, in which demands for civil compensation are inextricable from calls for the formal redress that veterans were nonetheless prevented from formally articulating. Though the settlement’s ambivalent outcomes can be seen in numerous ways, one of the most troubling for the beleaguered chemical corporations was that the suit’s “tail” end—its implications for a new set of claimants not covered in the original case—was not fully resolved. This opened the way for a subsequent suit that tests the scope of corporate responsibility. Whereas the landmark toxic tort settlement of the Agent Orange case brought the grievances of U.S. veterans and their families to national attention, a subsequent case sought compensation for victims unrepresented in the earlier suit: former Vietnamese soldiers, civilians, and their families, who claimed they were harmed through exposure to the defoliant. Would the Vietnamese bodies injured as a consequence of the war be compensated also? Dismissed by lower courts on the grounds that its claims of causality cannot be proven, and, as of this writing, slowly making its way through appeal motions, the more recent case remains symbolically significant because it is plainly politicized: the plaintiff’s brief alleges that the defendants’ supply of herbicides constitutes a “war crime.” That a settlement for Vietnamese as opposed to American victims is unlikely to be made is hardly surprising, however, as the issue of reparation remains unresolved. Indeed, the precedent for this irresolution was set decades earlier. On February 1, 1973, less than a year after Kim Phuc was dropped off with the Barsky Unit’s doctors for treatment, President Richard Nixon wrote a letter to Prime Minister Pham Van Dong secretly promising postwar reconstruction, as a way of facilitating the Paris Peace Accords.98 Instead of releasing the billions of dollars in aid pledged by Nixon, however, the United States initiated a series of decades-long trade sanctions that stymied the efforts of a newly unified SRV to rebuild. So hostile was the U.S. policy on Vietnam—besides the sanctions, demands for the release of thousands of missing combatants, who remained unaccounted for and were believed to be prisoners of war, served as

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obstacles to postwar reconciliation—that historians have suggested that the United States, in effect, extended the war well beyond its official end in 1975. Although Nixon’s secret letter was published in the New York Times on May 20, 1977, a day after it was declassified by the State Department, Vietnamese officials dropped demands for reparation during the 1980s, in hopes that, alongside the enormous groundswell of sympathy elicited in the Agent Orange lawsuit then underway, this gracious concession would enhance the case for “reconciliation.” While reconciliation has since been achieved, it has taken the form of normalization of relations in trade and diplomacy, rather than that of reparation, as Nixon’s letter offered. Against this context, medical philanthropy’s commitment to repair casts into relief not just the ways in which the task of reparation remains unfinished but also, more accurately, the fact that it has yet, and indeed is unlikely, to start. The contexts of the Hiroshima Maidens’ emergence in visual culture, and their striking parallels with the continued, subtly evolving post–Vietnam War symbolization of Kim Phuc’s body, reveals the ways in which the scar serves as a prominent reminder of wounding, a figure for healing, and an inspiration for fraught debates on appropriate forms of compensation—entangled resonances which those closely involved attempted, however problematically and ultimately unsuccessfully, to keep apolitical. In these critical cases, scars function as preeminent forms of disfigurement, dividing the United States from, as well as suturing it to, the Pacific theater of violence. Indeed, this abiding concern with repair is all the more compelling precisely because the state has yet to make formal reparations for its Pacific aggressions in Vietnam (in contrast to its post–World War II rebuilding of Europe, including Germany and to some extent Japan) and is fully legible only within the context of this failure. The scar’s persistent and spectacular appearance in key moments within twentiethcentury U.S. history renders visible the plight of foreign, feminine bodies damaged as a consequence of the violence of neo-imperial warfare. Similarly, medical philanthropy engaged in a process of transpacificism, so that through these humanitarian initiatives, which complexly mediated gestures of civility with its uncivil implications, the United States is sutured to the Pacific theater of war. Indeed, as a form of moral intervention, transpacificism anticipates the role that NGOs would play, during the post–Cold War period, in the paradigm shift from imperialism to empire influentially theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.99 At the same time, fascination with the spectacle of the scar risks rendering invisible these very bodies, as concern over the psychic health of nationhood acquires increased urgency. Even though the time for reparation may appear to have long since passed, given the United States’ currently cordial relationship with Japan, and its eventual reconciliation (specifically defined as the renewal of diplomatic and commercial relationship

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with Vietnam after the announcement of Ðôi mó’ i or “renovation” market re­ ? forms in the mid-1980s), demands for reparation are discernible, if not as a constitutional issue then as a civil one. Paradoxically, these contested, troubled ties irrevocably bind the United States to sites in Vietnam and Japan in a transnational network of altruistic civility responsible, at the same time, for summoning forth at selective, spectacular moments Asian figures of disfigurement, female bodies whose scars serve as sites, in turn, for symbolic expiation.

4 Racial Hygiene SARS, Surgical Masks, and the Civility of Surveillance

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n April 4, 2003, President George W. Bush invoked Executive Order 13295, extending the list of quarantinable diseases maintained by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to include severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).1 A disease that first emerged in November 2002 in Guangdong, China, SARS quickly spread within East and Southeast Asia and, in a globalized age of widespread travel, inevitably to Europe and North America before it was finally contained in July 2003.2 That SARS turned out not to pose a direct threat to the United States (there were ultimately only twentynine probable, and no confirmed, cases) suggests, paradoxically, the importance of this securitized response for the construction of the U.S. citizen as a figure who, in a time of crisis, is expected to submit to a regimen whose purposes are prevention (of contagion) and protection (of health). Despite the rapid containment of SARS and its ultimately limited threat, the decision to increase border surveillance by expanding the CDC’s list (which had remained unrevised for two decades, even though several new outbreaks had occurred in the intervening years) was nevertheless significant within this context:3 doing so authorized medical researchers to function as symbolic, if not actual, border guards, responsible for assessing the fitness of bodies seeking entrance to the United States. To expand the list is to authorize the containment of a foreign threat whose danger is mitigated because it is named; it is to stabilize a world teetering on the verge of collapse. Hygiene, defined as a program of activities to maintain public health, is a crucial part of this regimen, and the executive order reveals the urgency of hygienic vigilance in enforcing a protective boundary from contagion.

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As Alan Kraut and Nayan Shah have observed, public health plays a prominent role in defining U.S. citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4 Specifically, the implementation of strict rules for entry into the United States, enforcement of hygienic regulations, and emphasis on care and cleanliness of the body are in service of public health. In many cases, these rules sought to contain the pathological peril ascribed to Asian bodies. This racialization of disease can be seen in discourses about SARS, for even though infections were confirmed on several continents, and although it is no longer acceptable to name a disease according to the place of its apparent emergence, as in the cases of Ebola and Spanish flu, the contagion nevertheless remained associated with Chinese and, more generally, with Asian bodies.5 With the use of tests determining fitness for entry at the immigration-processing stations at Ellis and Angel Islands and quarantine measures targeting ethnic enclaves during outbreaks of disease, the citizen’s body is required to be a healthy one. By declaring the sick unfit and thus unable to carry out duties associated with republican approaches to citizenship such as productive labor, the process authorized their deportation. As Warwick Anderson explains in his history of the colonial conquest of the Philippines in the early twentieth century,6 this official vigilance over national health has far-reaching consequences; key to the management of an unruly and potentially rebellious population is the management of tropical disease. Public health’s emphasis on hygiene underscores the civilizing dimension of these missions: to be fit for citizenship, Anderson contends, the colonial body must first be a civilized one. That this requirement was maintained on U.S. shores demonstrates the abiding influence of public health for screening fitness within national terms that cannot ignore the potentially perilous consequences of extranational contact. While invocation of the executive order does not explicitly address the concept of citizenship, one can nevertheless discern an implicit concern for territoriality, a principle that Ariella Azoulay singles out as a defining feature of modern nation-state-based approaches to citizenship.7 As Shah points out, “the criteria of both subjectivity and full citizenship converge in the recognition of the capacity to reason and an expectation that certain manners, habits and types of consciousness and socialization would foster the capacity for selfgovernance” so that the status of aliens was determined in accordance with “norms of ‘civilized’ conduct that divided the civilized member of society from those lacking the capacities to exercise citizenship responsibly.”8 In the twentyfirst century, an array of approaches served similar ends of shaping the national health of citizens through healthcare regulations, as part of an increasingly elaborate etiquette of hygiene, strictures on comporting—and civilizing—the body to minimize the spread of pathogens. Regulations about this etiquette help assuage fears about foreign bodies and defend against the contagion they

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may carry. This chapter explores hygiene as a technique of civility that regulates the parameters of citizenship. In his landmark analysis of the civilizing process, Norbert Elias contends that conventions of comportment are marked by norms of self-regulation. Public affects such as shame, embarrassment, and disgust are instrumental to the internalization and privatization of behaviors that were previously externally displayed. Although hygiene is an underdeveloped theme in Elias’s ambitious study, he counters rational explanations for the development of etiquette, positing in a footnote that “‘rational understanding’ is not the motor of the ‘civilizing’ of eating or of other ways of behaving.”9 The socializing regime of “delicacy” precedes and even exceeds medical explanations of and rational justifications for hygiene that emerged in the wake of new manners that prescribed the practice of eating and other behaviors governed by standards of politeness. Rather than merely satisfying standards of healthfulness, the etiquette of hygiene serves cultural purposes also. The importance of civility in managing the threat of disease is perhaps most vividly expressed in The Flu Pandemic and You, the public health manual recently prepared by Colin Lee and short-story writer Vincent Lam (a medical doctor who worked in a SARS ward during the crisis) that extols the virtues of hygiene etiquette.10 In the manual, which was published as part of a national pandemic preparedness plan, Lee and Lam write that “[c]ough and sneeze etiquette is a worthwhile courtesy at all times, and even more relevant during an influenza pandemic.”11 The etiquette of hygiene regulates appropriate responses to seemingly involuntary bodily, or “natural,” symptoms of infection and guards against lapses in propriety, as when one has been rudely sneezed or coughed on. “What if someone has coughed or sneezed on your face?” they ask. They suggest the adoption of a socially embodied decorum, directing readers to consider, in a civilized and non-confrontational manner, advising the cougher or sneezer to employ cough and sneeze etiquette in the future. Finally, if you have been coughed or sneezed upon, be additionally careful in your own subsequent habits. In this way, if you have been infected, you can hopefully reduce the risk of transmitting the infection to others.12 In the name of health, bodies must comport themselves according to ever more rigid constraints constituted by the etiquette of hygiene in a logic that extends Norbert Elias’s account of the civilizing process. Focusing on the surgical mask as the most prominent feature of the etiquette of hygiene during the SARS crisis, this chapter explores the ways that

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this figure helps fashion a biological account of citizenship, or “biological citizenship,” a term introduced by anthropologist Adriana Petryna13 to describe the ways in which struggles for social rights to care are based on a collectivizing sense of embodied suffering, in collusion with and at times in opposition to, the surveillance and governmental functions associated with biopolitics.14 Donned in hospitals, on streets, and in airports along the routes of contagion and even in relatively unaffected areas, the mask is one of the most recognizable symbols of contagion in the twenty-first century, emerging as the “face” of SARS during this brief outbreak and ominously reappearing during the recent swine flu scare. Ostensibly a means of preventing contagion, the surgical mask, as it is represented in photojournalism, discursively exceeds this function, however. In focusing on the enigma posed by the partially obscured face of its wearers, such representations of the surgical mask raise intriguing questions about the cultural resonances of the face, especially its significance as a means of identifying citizen and foreigner, its necessity for engaging in an ethics of responsibility, and its evocation of an orientalist face discourse that, in Western criticism, radically “others” the Asian body by assigning to it the quality of illegibility. If, as Priscilla Wald contends in her persuasive analysis of “outbreak narratives” (cultural accounts of contagion that paradoxically mythologize disease through its rational explanation),15 the fitness of the healthy citizen is made legible against its foils, the potentially undetectably diseased bodies that haunt these narratives, what kind of body does the mask make visible and what is the significance of the face that the mask largely, if not wholly, obscures? Whereas Petryna considers the possibility of activism conducted by, and on behalf of, sick bodies as an agential approach to citizenship whose effect is to undermine definitions of citizenship based on the territoriality of the nation-state, I argue that territoriality remains an obstacle that bodies must grapple against in ongoing claims to the civil rights of citizenship. Biological citizenship is evoked through the photojournalistic focus on the surgical mask, a figure of disfigurement whose illegibility seems to defy the desire for epistemological clarity that Priscilla Wald characterizes as a defining feature of the “outbreak narratives.”16 The CDC’s redrawn borders—manifest in its potentially expanding list— can be seen as a refutation of an account of “flexible” citizenship described by Aihwa Ong that optimistically posits a kind of borderless world for Asian entrepreneurs.17 At the same time, these concerns with borders, although focused on contagion as a specific threat, overlaps with and even lends greater urgency to increasing surveillance in the wake of renewed concerns about terror attacks. For Engin Isen, these converging concerns reveal an “increasing complexity of environments” and give rise to a state of neurosis in response to “varieties of risk” that encompass not just fears about contagion but also about

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“security dangers”18 that have intensified since the September 11, 2001 attacks. The sense of crisis in response to SARS accordingly reflects and also extends the war on terror’s alert about threatening bodies and the effort to bar these bodies from entry to the United States. Additionally, these borders are not just enforced at obvious sites of struggle, such as peripheral zones of contact (at airports and so on), but also on the surface of the body itself, which is often subject to the restrictions posed by such barrier technologies as the surgical mask. Against the context of these overlapping fears of contagion and terror (however justified or, as is sometimes the case, unwarranted and disproportionate to the actual threat posed), the barrier technology of the surgical mask is also analogous to the figure of the veil. Like the mask, the veil challenges norms of legibility and offers the possibility of confounding the state’s biopolitical desire to disclose the body’s truths. Through its participation in a process that Benjamin Muller calls “identity management,”19 this civility of surveillance—which finds expression through techniques of hygienic vigilance—qualifies and disqualifies bodies for migration in its attempt to securitize citizenship.

Masks, Medicine, Magic During the tense months of the SARS crisis, perhaps the most visible sign of this new disease was the proliferation of the suddenly ubiquitous surgical masks (Figure 4.1).20 Worn almost everywhere, not only in hospitals but also at school performances—as the title SARS Ballet suggests—on streets and at airports, the mask served as the “face” of SARS, while ironically obscuring much, although not all, of its wearer’s face. And yet the significance of the mask is by no means clear. Although those who donned loose-fitting masks on the streets and in hospitals doubtless felt they were protected from contagion, the effectiveness of doing so is disputed.21 The most commonly worn, generic surgical masks were not the N95 model (able to filter 95 percent of infectious agents) recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), CDC, and Health Canada, among other health care organizations around the world. If this other, widely worn surgical mask—whether adopted through ignorance of the difference between masks22 or because supplies of the N95 were limited23 —does not in fact serve the medical function which the N95 model does, its significance may lie elsewhere. Instead of functioning as an effective means of protection, the surgical mask demonstrates the belief, or rather faith, in protection; it confirms, on the micro-level of the body and its maintenance of a courteous, civil distance from other bodies, the state’s macro-level concern with imposing boundaries; and it paradoxically also puts these masked, less intelligible bodies potentially beyond state surveillance.

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Figure 4.1  SARS Ballet. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu.)

The surgical mask has a lengthy, though not well known, history. During epidemics, cloths soaked with vinegar or other liquids believed to be medicinal were held close to the nose and often covered the mouth as well, serving a “masking” function.24 Some medical historians, however, trace the wearing of masks by surgeons to the fourteenth century, as one of the boundary technologies implemented in response to the deadly outbreak of bubonic plague. Because the cause of plague and the means of its transmission were not understood at the time, those treating or handling the sick, dying, or dead did so only from a distance. At its extreme, spatial separation involved quarantine, a method controversial, on the one hand, because of its ineffectiveness (many escaped) and, on the other, because of its deadly effectiveness (it often trapped the healthy with the infectious). Spatial separation also took more subtle form in the uniform adopted by surgeons, who made sure to apply oil on the robes worn over their clothing, on their gloves, and directly onto their temples, mouths, and nostrils before examining their patients. Part of this distinctive attire included the beaked mask and white staff depicted in the plague art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Figure 4.2).25 The staff was used to lift the clothes or bedcoverings of a patient, and the mask often contained a nosegay of aromatics to dispel the noxious fumes then believed to cause disease. This strange uniform not only ensured that layers of clothing and props

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Figure 4.2  Dr. Schnabel von Rom (Paul Fürst). The plague doctors depicted in early modern art wore a sinister costume that included the characteristic beaked mask and white staff.

prevented direct, fleshly contact; it also helpfully identified the function of its wearer as surgeon, specifically his role in navigating through plague-ridden spaces that were avoided by others. As a barrier technology, the mask in particular imposed a physical and visual distinction and marked the surgeon’s professional stature, differentiating attendant from attendee. The scientific explanation for the development of the surgical mask, however, obscures the mask’s origins at a moment when the disciplinary distinction between medicine and magic still seemed porous. Jamie Kamph notes that “using masks to exorcise the demons of disease is not a far cry to using face coverings to avoid infection.”26 Anthropologists note that before the use of masks during the Black Plague, masks were used in exorcism ceremonies to drive out spirits believed responsible for various ailments. During this time, “protection” seemed to rely as much on faith as on science. Nevertheless, the adoption of the plague mask as a means of imposing a physical barrier between bodies initiates the social distancing techniques that undergirds today’s varied techniques of hygienic etiquette. A means of distancing patient from surgeon, the plague mask (worn by the latter) also helped distinguish between—and thereby identify—these two figures. This function would become increasingly nuanced as understanding about disease transmission developed and the germ theory of infectious disease refuted the miasma theory of noxious influences.27 Whereas the plague mask was a sign identifying the surgeon that was believed to confer the added benefit of protecting him from his patients, at the turn of the last century, the surgical mask, mainly worn by health care workers, was meant to protect patients from infection. Put simply, in the twentieth century, the principle of protection became reciprocal rather than merely unidirectional. Instead of being worn solely by either doctor or patient, surgical masks are now commonly worn by both parties, with the goal of preventing the transmission of germs from and to doctor and patient alike.

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In the twenty-first century, an even more suggestive difference is evident: the mask is not worn only by surgeons and the sick. The healthy body also regularly adopts this barrier technology.28 Among the many striking features of the SARS outbreak is thus the reversal of the mask’s earlier associations. The widespread usage of the mask suggests that it is meant to protect its wearer from infection, rather than, as was the case in the early twentieth century, to protect the patient from infection potentially transmitted by the wearer or in accordance with a reciprocal preventive practice. (Indeed, doctors suggest that masks would be most effective if worn by already infected patients, so as to reduce the risk of spreading contagion.) Even though the implementation of barrier technologies seems to define subjects in terms of health and illness, these divisions often turn out to be as fragile as the bodies that sought, through adoption of these technologies in the first place, a bulwark against the threat of this collapse. No longer can the mask be relied on as a means of distinguishing and identifying its wearer. For this reason, the mask fits uneasily into discourses of contagion, or “outbreak narratives,” a genre that, according to Priscilla Wald, comprises disparate cultural accounts of disease and is characterized by a desire for coherence, as methodological as well as ideological defense against contagion’s chaotic effects. Fittingly, the structure of such narratives, she posits, follows that of detective stories, in which nothing less is at stake than decisive reordering of a profoundly shaken world. Wald’s analysis contends that in communicating about contagion—what it is, who is vulnerable, how to treat it—outbreak narratives effectively constitute community as a defense against this threat. In helping to answer these questions, such narratives effectively redraw otherwise fracturing boundaries of nationhood according to the parameters of health and disease by rendering intelligible an otherwise terrifyingly incomprehensible phenomenon. Stock characters, significant features of such narratives, play a crucial role in this process. Besides heroic epidemiologists and martyrs who sacrifice themselves for a cure, there are morally dubious “superspreaders” such as Typhoid Mary,29 and “patient zeroes,” such as Gaetan Dugas, the gay Canadian flight attendant blamed for bringing AIDS to North America. In the case of SARS, such characters appear as “index cases,” such as the flight attendant who allegedly introduced the disease to Singapore, the doctor believed to be responsible for the calamitous infection at the Metropole Hotel in Hong Kong, and, more colorfully, the “poison kings” and “poison emperors,” so called because of their ability to spread infection faster and farther than imagined possible.30 Cast as foreign, these characters are nonetheless comforting because of the epistemological clarity secured through the conventions of the outbreak narrative.

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The subjects who wear the mask ultimately confound the epistemological imperative of the outbreak narrative, however. Rather than disclose identity, today’s widespread adoption of the mask screens a confluence of urgent questions—regarding the ethics of otherness, the constitution of community, and the mobility of bodies—that focus on the surface that the mask most obscures, the face. This “face” of SARS is its seeming facelessness.

Facing SARS To grasp why this potential facelessness is profoundly troubling, we need only consider the primacy ascribed to the face. The centrality of faciality to debates on affect and ethics is evident from Charles Darwin’s landmark The Expression of Emotions in Humans and Animals31 to Silvan Tomkins’s studies in Affect, Imagery, Consciousness.32 In these theories, face is a primary basis for affective engagement and for social connection. No one makes this latter point more forcefully than Emmanuel Levinas, who writes, “The way in which the other presents himself exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me.”33 In his analysis, face functions as the confrontation with and connection to the other that imposes on the self an ethical demand. It is not a particular face that is of concern in this ethical mode of engagement; rather, it is the idea of face that Levinas underscores as the basis of ethics itself, an idea that rests on the premise of transparency. This figure for Levinas is, one might add, a mirror that enables a reflective recognition of otherness within the self. Indeed, this radical alterity undergirds Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s account of “facialization,” which theorizes that the ethics predicated on an engagement with the face can be extended beyond the human body to animals and inanimate objects.34 Unlike Darwin, for whom the face (alongside other embodied gestures) expresses emotions, or even those psychologists and anthropologists who have challenged Darwin by claiming instead that the face communicates, Levinas insists that this figure and the demand it occasions precedes representation, expression, or for that matter, communication.35 The figure of the face signals not a particular visage, a set of features or range of expressions that communicates, but rather communicability itself, an openness to the other that is the primary condition for communication. In this concern, Levinas relocates the tactile social commitment of the handshake—the embodied gesture of ­civility that, as we have seen, first inspired his meditations on ethics—to the face, suggesting that the latter surface likewise motivates an ethical etiquette. If face

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is the figure for figuration—the basis for ethical engagement—what are the implications of the mask’s tendency to obscure the face?36 How is an ethics predicated on faciality impacted when many of the distinctive and affective registers of the face are obscured? How are we to account for the mask? At first glance, the disfigurement associated with the mask would seem to refuse the ethical imperative theorized by Levinas. Accordingly, though it putatively contains infection by muffling coughs, SARS’s primary symptom of respiratory distress, the mask is a barrier technology that, like the condom prominently featured in discourses surrounding the AIDS pandemic,37 preserves life while at the same time redefining what it means to live, notably under conditions that tacitly but irrefutably reject the touch or even the breath of the other. As Martin S. Pernick reminds us, the word contagion derives from the Latin roots for contiguous, con and tangere, literally “to touch together,” and thus denotes the significance of physical contact in communicating disease.38 The ethics ascribed to faciality is undermined by an alternative civility, an etiquette of hygiene, that underscores the necessity of practices that health care practitioners refer to as social distancing, which maintain barriers in hopes of minimizing the risk of communicating contagion. This approach to perceiving the mask’s eschewal of the ethics of faciality is also, perhaps, a persuasive way of comprehending the recent shift in emphasis, from protection of the sick to preventive measures in defense of the healthy. To the extent that the face is the figure for figuration, the masking of the features that distinguish a face constitutes a type of disfigurement.39 The disfigurement characteristic of the SARS outbreak would seem to suggest a turning away from the other as a means of preserving the self. Indeed, the vulnerability of the community constituted in this way is, according to Ed Cohen, suggested in the curious contradiction posed by the biomedical concept of immunity as a defense against contagion.40 As Roberto Esposito points out,41 whereas “immunity” is a juridical concept introduced in ancient Rome that denotes an exception to the rule of law, the notion of self-defense for Cohen can be traced to Thomas Hobbes’s theory of “natural rights” that posits war as a perpetual and inevitable condition of life.42 Because immunity and defense are contradictory principles (the rule of law and the state of war surely cancel each other out), immunity-as-defense is the antonym of community. The premise of social distancing as a biopolitical technique, in which the mask serves as one of the body’s first lines of defense, barring contact with others during outbreaks when immunity has yet to be secured, is predicated on an uncertain faith that community can nevertheless be maintained. Photographs of crowded city streets filled with mask-wearing denizens who seem to shun physical contact with and to refuse acknowledgment of others who similarly share their plight underscore this sense of anomie.

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Within a context in which the mask simultaneously hides disfigurement while constituting disfigurement’s most visible sign, it can thus hardly be surprising that mask wearers are, in these most recent medical emergencies, almost uniformly stigmatized, if not always racialized. Although by all accounts race was not a factor in the handling of SARS in Hong Kong, which is predominantly ethnic Chinese, class was clearly a basis for discrimination, especially in the aftermath of the outbreak at Amoy Gardens, a working-class apartment complex.43 The most obvious form of stigmatization was the travel advisory, a twenty-first-century version of quarantine, which, while not always enforced by the military as it was in China, was perceived to exact an economic, if not psychic toll, the extent of which remained for some time a source of vigorous debate.44 For example, in lifting its warning for Toronto—despite the fact that the outbreak was yet to be contained—and not for Singapore, the WHO arguably may have implied that SARS followed an unbroken Asiatic route of transmission. In this instance, it seemed that the etiquette of hygiene was unevenly implemented and enforced. The controversy surrounding travel advisories implies that representations of the surgical mask invoke, while also subtly subverting, the discourse of saving face. Notably, the desire to save face is evident in the response of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to SARS, the most scandalous of which was the dramatic forced evacuation of infected patients from a Beijing military hospital moments before a WHO inspection. PRC officials, who first denied the fact of the outbreak, minimized its extent, and finally cooperated under international pressure, were criticized for their secrecy and dishonesty—characteristics conventionally ascribed to the social practice of saving face.45 Indeed, numerous news reports chastising the PRC’s disastrous cover-up explicitly refer to this practice as the underlying motivation of officials.46 Supposedly a distinctive attribute of Chinese national character, saving face, known as lian and mien-tzu, is defined as the social practices that help preserve and confer pride and dignity of self through deferral to others. Anthropologists and sociologists have observed that the practice of saving face highlights the significance of a collective sensibility and a repudiation of individualism, which is purportedly a principal characteristic of U.S. identity. This tendency, cultural critic Andrew Kipnis argues, remains an enduring stereotype of Chinese-ness. In his study of face discourse, Kipnis reveals that descriptions of this putative national character derive from distorted portrayals of the Chinese by late nineteenth and early twentieth-century missionaries who sought to justify funding and military support for their overseas missions by magnifying the threat posed by this seemingly duplicitous, or two-faced, population.47 Arthur H. Smith, for example, attributes to the Chinese a histrionic tendency that he claims is manifest in widely practiced melodramatic rituals:

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Upon very slight provocation, any Chinese regards himself in the light of an actor in a drama. He throws himself into theatrical attitudes, performs the salaam, falls upon his knees, prostrates himself and strikes his head upon the earth, under circumstances which to an Occidental seems [sic] to make such actions superfluous, not to say ridiculous.48 The practice of saving face was thus mystified by such accounts. Because it ostensibly defied comprehension for the missionaries, the practice helped justify the use of force to contain the threat posed by such “inscrutable” subjects to the missionaries’ civilizing project. Depictions of national character that underscored the theme of face dovetailed with fears about the Yellow Peril, particularly those that centered on the inscrutability of Chinese subjects.49 But, as Erving Goffman reminds us, “face-work,” contrary to missionary descriptions, is not a peculiarly Chinese characteristic. Even though other sociologists insist on the uniqueness of this practice for the Chinese, they too ultimately acknowledge that correlates of saving “face” such as pride and social pressure are applicable beyond the Chinese context. In other words, the discourse of face, understood by Goffman as a means by which rituals for social interaction take place, is not a uniquely Chinese practice, but rather is one shared among many cultures—including those in Europe and North America. Though Goffman’s theory of face-work, defined as “the actions taken by a person to make whatever he is doing consistent with face,”50 draws inspiration from these Sino-centric accounts of face, his larger point is that “face” is the focus for social behaviors shared across cultures. Following in the path forged by Darwin on the expression of human emotions, Paul Ekman discovers that the tendency among his Japanese research subjects to repress affect when in the presence of authority figures attests to “display rules” rather than to the truth of “Oriental inscrutability.”51 Face is the basis, the interface as it were, of a widely shared social practice. Whereas the face discourse constructed by missionaries in China at the turn of the last century focused on the metaphoric veil connoted by the duplicitous illegibility of a still-visible face, the facelessness implicit in this perspective on “saving face” is, in the twenty-first century, realized in the surgical mask’s seeming facelessness. After all, the surgical mask does not obscure the face wholly; in this regard, it may be more accurate to refer not to the facelessness of this barrier technology, but rather to its attenuated facelessness.52 In drawing attention to the orientalist roots of face discourse, my aim is not to absolve the PRC of what, by all accounts, appear to be frequently intentional and occasionally unwitting mistakes in response to the SARS outbreak. Instead, my concern is to reveal the ways that saving face serves as the

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unspoken yet clearly recognizable subtext that ascribes to the PRC’s motivations the peculiarity of Chinese-ness. The fallacy of this assumption is clear when we compare the ways that the motivations of mistakes made elsewhere were explained.53 The lobbying efforts of other cities to lift the travel advisory surely fall along the discursive continuum of saving face. And yet the vastly varied interpretations of what are, after all, similar actions with similar motivations are all the more puzzling given the fact that contemporary face discourse entangles business concerns and public perception.54 Far from revealing the importance of saving face, such concerns were not interpreted through the lens of face discourse when it came to these other sites along the route of disease transmission. (For example, Toronto’s worries about public perception were understood as concerns about the loss of tourism revenue.) Instead, face discourse implicitly yet predictably was redesignated by critics as the preserve of a broadly construed and widely misapprehended Asian essence, which was perhaps given clearest expression in Spanish and Brazilian popular forums, which regularly referred to SARS as “pneumonia Asiatica.” This focus on a peculiarly Chinese facelessness as an illegible disfigurement calls to mind the inscrutability ascribed to the face-saving practices of the Yellow Peril era. In so doing, the discourse functions as a Sino-sign, inscribing onto the mask the marker of race that, in an age of cultural constructivism, can no longer be fixed onto the body.55 The racialization of disease is underscored through another trope of the outbreak narrative, animal intimacy and the specter of uncivilized appetite that it conjures. Behind the alarm bells sounded by this epidemiological focus on the zoonotic means of disease transmission—the emergence of SARS has been traced by researchers to the coronavirus, which jumped the species barrier from its “natural” host, the civet cat, to humans, who trespassed into jungles in order to satiate their unnatural taste for exotic meats—often lurks a thinly disguised emphasis on the ways in which such practices constitute a rejection of the civilizing process, the socially productive effects of self-restraint cogently described by Elias. For Elias, table manners are a prominent feature of this process, so that how to eat (e.g., the utensils used to tackle the meal, the level of conversation considered socially acceptable, and so on)—and in the context of debates on zoonotic transmission, what to eat—bears on not just the fulfillment of a natural function of sustaining the body, but also the coordination of the body’s cultural management. Accounts of SARS’s emergence can be seen to draw palpable distinctions between civility and incivility, between the savage appetites of a primitive population and the need to comport the body in accordance with an etiquette of hygiene. According to Nicole Shukin, the emphasis on zoonosis, species jumping, within pandemic speculation is another method

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by which the process that she calls a “civilizing project” extends beyond the period of a strictly Western modernity that was the focus of Elias’s study: Pandemic speculation can be seen as a civilizing project that works, specifically, to correct ethnic others’ unhygienic intimacy with animals in an era of globalization. As the animal entanglements of ethnic constituencies are filtered through the hygienic mask of pandemic discourse, it is the legitimacy of these ethnic subjects as global citizens and their place within the kinship structure of global capitalism that is being biopolitically calculated.56 While Shukin invokes the concept of the “hygienic mask” to designate figuratively the constraining effects of pandemic discourse, the proliferation of surgical masks in the twenty-first century dramatically illustrates the literal enactment of this process. Hygiene serves as the alibi of public health policies, and the mask is a trope that encapsulates the prevailing concerns of such policies with maintaining divisions between human and animal. These divisions, in turn, are euphemisms for ethnic otherness, so that, as Shukin puts it, “the biopolitical production of the bare life of the animal other subtends, then, the biopolitical production of the bare life of the racialized other.”57 To dwell on the bestial origins of a pathogen is to reconstruct racial divisions through the more acceptable figure of the animal. Indeed, as Priscilla Wald points out, representations of contagion tend to emphasize a unitary route of disease transmission, from the third world—construed as underdeveloped and uncivilized sites—to the first world. Within this cartography of contagion, racialized diseases such as AIDS (which is erroneously explained in urban legends as the consequence of sex with monkeys) and SARS (which is attributed to a similarly unwholesome appetite for monkeys) are ultimately ascribed as products of “primitive,” uncivil behavior.

Etiquette at the Airport Conversely, the illegibility of the mask can be seen to inspire other, compensatory techniques of visualization. The only other figure that received close attention within the United States was the cause of the disease itself, the coronavirus. Striking for their vibrant colors and perfectly spherical form, illustrations of the coronavirus triumphantly reveal the pathogen’s genetic decoding, a process that was intensely competitive as research laboratories in Hong Kong, Canada, and the United States vied for international recognition.58 As glossy heralds of the victory of knowledge, such illustrations offer formal validation of the outbreak narrative’s desire to see, know, and thereby dispel the mystery

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constituted by contagion. Newsweek, for example, announced the discovery with the headline “Virus: Breathing Easier” and “Solving the Mystery.”59 Demonstrating the currency of Michel Foucault’s contention that in a biopolitical age—in which discipline of the body serves the ends of defining a population through its regulation—“visibility is a trap,”60 the coronavirus illustration operates in conjunction with an array of tests increasingly mapping the body onto visible coordinates of blood work, heart rates, and febrility. These visual techniques ensure that specialists can recognize the healthy, detect the sick, and recommend proper physical comportment to ensure continued vitality.61 Special training of airport security is required to address the uncertainty posed by mobile bodies. The civility at the heart of this training’s approach to the handling of bodies and information is tellingly described by journalist Matthew L. Wald as an “etiquette” of patting down passengers.62 For example, the thermal scan, military hardware developed explicitly for purposes of state surveillance (it remains most widely used in narcotics operations) and adapted to monitor borders more effectively, may best be understood as a method deployed to penetrate the frustrating illegibility of facelessness—to go, that is, beyond the frustrating opacity of the face. Used at airports to screen the fitness of travelers and to bar the unhealthy, the thermal scan seeks to apprehend the body’s true state of infection based on colorful illustrations of febrility. Spikes in temperature above 99.5 degrees Fahrenheit glow bright red on twin flat-panel displays, and the system is sensitive enough to register temperatures at a range of fifteen feet. Its adoption at airports in Asian and North American countries, moreover, suggests that this shared desire to render transparent the health of the body exceeds simplistic racial divisions while at the same time preserving other biologically based binaries. Despite its sensitivity, range, and accuracy, the thermal scan nevertheless cannot overcome the limits of detection: not every fever is attributable to SARS; moreover, reddening of the monitor can reflect other, innocuous physiological changes such as sunburn, moderate alcohol consumption, or exercise.63 That its effectiveness is widely disputed thus further underscores the difficulty of interpreting the body, occasioning in turn the development and deployment of an array of technologies that for Lisa Parks marks the airport as “a charged and volatile domain punctuated by shifting regimes of biopower.”64 So keen is the securitized state to “read” the body’s vital signs that the nuances of not only emotional expression but also of so-called micro-expressions, the minute signs that may index malignant intentions, are the subject of scrutiny. In this concern with cataloging emotional minutia, the work of Paul Ekman in developing the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is further refined to include an “Affect Interpretation” database, as part of what Peter Adey describes as “an ­assemblage of technolo-

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gies, knowledges, and practices which attempt to regulate mobilities across and through borders such as airports.”65 The mask extends this biopolitical scrutiny of the body onto that body’s surface. However, in so doing, it ironically renders the body potentially illegible, offering a way of countering surveillance. At the airport—a liminal space where border guards function as surrogates of sovereign power—the veil arguably excites as much epistemological anxiety as the mask does, if not more.66 The war on terror casts the veil as a powerful though complex trope, in which the fate of Muslim women, on the one hand, provides handy ideological justification for foreign policy decisions (which are partially explained through a neocolonial female liberation discourse), and, on the other hand, challenges the state’s ability to control the bodies that they ostensibly seek to free.67 In fact, only a year before surgical masks appeared as the emblem of the SARS crisis, controversies swirled about the unjust treatment of South Asian and Arab Americans who confronted, as few other communities did, the indignities of “flying while brown”—the racial profiling analogous to the condition of “driving while black.” In January 2002, the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations sought an apology from Global Aviation Services and Northwest and Delta Airlines on behalf of seventeen-year-old Enaas Sarsour, who was forced by a male airline security screener to remove her head scarf.68 In a case that was filed in an Illinois court in August 2003, during the waning days of the SARS crisis, a South Asian woman, twenty-three-year-old American citizen Samar Kaukab, was likewise humiliated at the airport.69 Although she had not set off any alarms, Kaukab was publicly scrutinized and told that she must remove her hijab and submit to a more detailed body search that would be conducted in private—with a male screener. Only after her repeated objections was the invasive full-body search conducted with a female screener instead. With the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, Kaukab’s lawsuit drew on the First Amendment’s free exercise clause, which protects the right to freedom of religion. Although the suit was settled for an undisclosed sum, it nevertheless serves as a reminder of the ways that inscriptions of race now turn not just to the body but also to the body’s accoutrements in a process that interpellates “oriental” travelers in ways that draw provocative analogies between them as sources of Asiatic contagion and extremist terror. This analogy between the mask and the veil discloses the extent to which racializing surveillance technologies effectively overlap. As technologies converge in parallel ways, to surveil Chinese, South Asian, and Arab bodies, Asian American constituencies in turn are challenged to broaden and transform their political alliances in protest against these civil rights infringements.70

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Figure 4.3  Personalized masks worn for “Miss Mask” contest. (AP Photo/Wally Santana.)

Another means of defying the strictures of surveillance can be seen on the surface of the mask itself. During the SARS crisis, sales of special masks adorned with designer labels and quirky patterns were surprisingly brisk (Figure 4.3). Many of these patterns featured cartoon renderings of animals (not shown), suggesting that these accessible icons provide a counterpoint to the exotic animality associated with zoonotic transmission. As a form of face-work, these “expressive” masks are communicative in function, and thus they suggest the possible persistence of the sociability of face in opposition to the depersonalization and dehumanization associated with the mask’s tendency to disfigure its wearers. Attempts to inscribe on the mask’s homogenous surface marks of distinction that evoke characteristics associated with the face foreground the importance of the gaze that looks from—and beyond—the mask’s disfigurement. Far from wholly surrendering to the threat of apocalypse portended by contagion, the gaze provides a possible counternarrative of rejuvenation. This counternarrative is often constituted through celebrations of cultural performance (Figure 4.4), repeated reference to the theme of romance. Contesting images of contagion that dwell on abandoned public places and anomie in spaces that remain—incomprehensibly, it seems—crowded is the depiction of the intimacy of couples who defy unspoken but widely understood strictures to avoid the other. Instead, the camera captures, or, as is more likely the case, stages their unmistakable touch, a lingering gaze, occasionally even a

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Figure 4.4  SARS kiss. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan.)

kiss. The counternarrative of intimacy constituted by this grouping of popular press photographs relies on the excessive sentiment that Peter Brooks associates with melodrama, a mode that, in relying on Manichean structures, has as its end the revelation of morality in a secular age.71 Two photographs are particularly evocative. The first, an extreme closeup of a couple in an intimate embrace moments before a kiss, is credited to Ng Han Guan, a photographer for the Associated Press. While news photos range widely in subject matter, this type of intimacy is striking for its sharp focus and the stillness of the subjects, who seem frozen in their embrace, suggesting that the freeze is a property of the couple rather than a function of the camera. The second photograph, taken by Vincent Yu (Figure 4.5), maintains this focus on the union of the couple, but within a more enlarged social and spatial context. Indeed, when viewed next to the one taken by Ng, it is tempting to think of the wedding as a culmination of the sense of unity promised by the embrace. Both photographs focus on the couple whose life-affirming union defies contagion’s obvious prohibition against touch and its tacit strictures

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Figure 4.5  Wedding during SARS. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu.)

against love. Indeed, though the couples wear masks, the coverings no longer seem to connote boundary but rather its permeability. While still reminders of the imminence of contagion, the masks function in these two photographs as fashion accessories—in a manner evocative of the bridal veil worn by the marrying couple—rather than strictly surgical accoutrements. A similar photograph, called SARS Wedding, was taken by Qiu Yan, a photographer with Wuhan Evening News. The SARS wedding photograph was first published on May 7, 2003, and then again nearly a year later on Valentine’s Day after it was singled out for distinction in the World Press Photo (WPP) 2004 competition and awarded third prize in the “Daily Life” category.72 The union depicted in this photograph and the life-affirming message that arguably was the basis of its popularity as well as that of these other depictions of romance was controversial, however. Shortly after the results of the WPP competition were announced, the “groom” in the picture, Chen Ying, filed a lawsuit alleging that SARS Wedding was staged.73 Chen, who claimed to be a model at the SeSe photo shop, which he says is visible in the photo, alleged that Qiu had visited on May 5, 2003, asking for help with a shoot and selected him and another model at the shop to pose, respectively, as bride and groom. He maintained that not only was he unmarried at the time of the lawsuit (as well as at the time that the photograph was taken); he was also not romantically involved with the girl in the photograph. Moreover, the photograph itself, he

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contended, ruined his relationship with his actual girlfriend at the time. He sought compensation of 150,000 yuan for the damage the photograph had done to his reputation. The lawsuit was, apparently, the first that involved the WPP since its competition had begun in 1957, and while the defendants, Qiu and Wuhan Evening News, countered by suggesting that Chen was motivated by greed, the case puts into relief the framing perceptible even in Ng and Yu’s more “authentic,” but undoubtedly carefully edited, photograph. It highlights, in other words, what one likely suspects about such pictures: though they could very well be truthful in their depiction of the scenes of courtship, they are unquestionably pointed in directing viewers’ eyes toward the seemingly self-evident truth of love. Why should these photographs strive to direct viewers’ attention to the rituals of love and reproduction, the touch between bodies and the propriety of that touch? It could be argued that courtship is, by definition, contrived to the extent that it follows strict conventions, of which perhaps the most recognizable are the embrace/kiss and the heterosexual couple as ideal union. These conventions also characterize the representation of courtship. In fact, wedding photography is arguably one of the most conventional genres,74 and the incorporation of the seeming spontaneity of ritual associated with this subgenre dovetails with the daily-life reportage of Qiu Yan here. Though the case still appears unresolved, regardless of whether these allegations about fabrication are true, one cannot doubt the appetite for such images. It is evident among the photographers who composed such scenes, among the viewers who recirculated such images, and among the judges who singled out SARS Wedding for distinction. What this appetite suggests is the longing for an alternative mode of representation to the usual anonymity of the SARS mask, however trite or contrived this alternative may be. Just as important, the group of photographs that seem to fulfill this longing have in common an emphasis on the primacy of a gaze of recognition that can be seen to offer a symbolic form of opposition to the mask’s disfiguring, dehumanizing effects. In comparison with other, starker scenes of masked isolation and anomie, it is easy to see why these photographs and many others like them were so appealing. In their sentimental depiction—one that hearkens to the family framing of intimacy so important for the struggle against exclusion laws described in Chapter 1—they are pointed reminders not only that life goes on but that the celebration of life through the gestures of courtship and rituals of marriage, though troublingly heteronormative, is essential for survival. (Indeed, heteronormativity may be seen as essential for survival in this mythology if survival includes future generations.) While the plots of romance and detection can both be broadly described as melodramatic, so that conventions associated with the former are often incorporated within the

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development of the latter, the romance associated with SARS counters narratives that emphasize its detection. The ideal, if not the realization, of courtship and marriage continue despite, and in explicit defiance of, contagion. If the recirculation of the favored tropes of anonymity and love in this recent outbreak is any indication, the first twenty-first-century plague, as SARS was dubbed (not to mention its virulent successor, H1N1), was thus startling because it exposed the vulnerabilities of a global village brought uncom­ fortably close together. Despite SARS’s relatively modest mortality rate and compressed time line, the representation of the outbreak merits close attention because of its special hold in epidemiological debates and in the popular imagination. Heralded as the first millennial super-bug whose virulence is feared in an age of widespread jet travel—when the ramifications of touching are expo­ nentially magnified75—the outbreak quashed any lingering hubristic belief in the triumph of antibiotics over microbial threats. In so doing, the outbreak reshapes how we see, know, and fail to know contagion in the twenty-first century. This averted pandemic introduced a vivid representational repertory—of which the mask is a prominent feature—that today remains a striking part of the archive of “surgical” imaging, pictures of pathology, that gives provocative shape, form, and color to what it means to be healthy or sick, citizen or noncitizen. In this process, the surgical mask itself confirms yet also unsettles these distinctions, as part of an ambivalent technology that renders bodies intelligible and unintelligible in accordance with hygienic regulations that are premised on norms of civility. While at first glance the surgical mask seems a mundane accessory, as necessary a precautionary technique in a postmicrobiological world as washing one’s hands and sterilizing equipment, it served other discursive functions as well. Among the most fascinating of these is to inscribe beyond, though still very close to, the body the unmistakable signs of racial difference. In focusing on the Asian bodies that wear the surgical mask, the outbreak narrative about SARS evokes the symbols of Yellow Peril hysteria, particularly the resonances of face discourse fixated on the inscrutability of Chinese social practices. Thus the surgical mask Sinocized SARS, rendering its wearers recognizable, indeed stereotypical, characters during a period of uncertainty and emergency. This process of disfigurement, however, is only partially complete, as longstanding assumptions about the face’s function as a mirror troubles conceptions of the mask’s connotations. Against the mask’s paradoxically legible anonymity, counterinscriptions attest strikingly to an alternative approach to contagion. If the outbreak narrative emphasizes world making, the counterarticulations that recodify the mask as a multilayered signifying system assert the primacy of an equally complex gaze, whose meanings unstably waver between the stigma of disfigurement and the defiance of defacement.

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Coda: Postracial Inscriptions Why, then, did the mask not disappear with the disappearance of SARS? As testimony to their seductive power, the complex implications of the surgical mask this chapter traces—from faciality to disfigurement to the confounding effects of the gaze—were reinvoked with the emergence of H1N1 or swine flu, the most alarming contagion since avian flu and SARS. In March 2009, news of a novel strain of flu, a potentially lethal hybrid of avian and Spanish flu, nearly shut down air travel in and out of Mexico. Deserted churches, streets, and public squares attested to the isolating effects of unofficial quarantine. Whenever people did venture out, many did so only while wearing surgical masks. Most perceptible when considered within the context of ongoing clashes between the United States and Mexico about illegal aliens, or undocumented workers, the ubiquity of the surgical mask puts a vivid though ironic, because anonymous, “face” to the countless hordes perceived by conservative commentators as threatening the security and safety of these fiercely defended borders. One need not look far to discern a link between the unofficial though effective closing of the spatial border of Mexico, which calls to mind the travel advisories issued during the SARS outbreak, the securitization of airports as part of the war on terror, and the biological/physical border imposed by the mask: the mask enacts on an individual but no less effective scale geopolitical negotiations of bodies and boundaries that, through the discursive screens of health and hygiene, restricts movement and inscribes otherwise discredited racial typologies. Indeed, the term swine flu, in drawing attention to the zoonotic route of disease transmission, serves as a subtle reminder of the way that the figure functions as a placeholder for “race,” in which, as we have seen, blame for the emergence of exotic disease is attributed to the putatively unnatural and uncivil intimacy between people and animals. Although the shift in terminology from swine flu to the more neutral term H1N1 can be seen as a deferral to the powerful pork industry—shares of pork commodities apparently plummeted during the first few weeks in which the outbreak was announced—the outbreak narrative’s emphasis on the primordial origins of disease, its characterization of the uncivilized state of the people who live perilously close to animals, obscures the fact that this flu pandemic likely originated in the context not of primitive animal intimacy but rather of industrialized agribusiness. Perote, in Veracruz state, where the index case is now thought to have occurred, is also home to a pig farm which is partially owned by Smithfield Foods, a U.S.-based company that happens to be one of the largest producers of pork. This story and the “unnatural” practices of industrial hog farming tellingly received little coverage in the

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early days of the narratives about disease emergence. Instead, what is shown prominently in that panicked period is the seemingly unhygienic practices of uncivilized people and the masked faces of those who sought protection from the disease. It should come as no surprise, then, that the initial “Mexicanization” of the H1N1 virus was greeted with many calls to tighten increasingly militarized border checkpoints. The most inflammatory comments, according to Breaking News 24/7, a media-watch blog, were made by talk-show hosts, who claimed that “illegal aliens are the carriers”; referred to the virus as “fajita flu” and “Mexican flu”; called Mexican immigrants “criminalians”; and dubbed emergency rooms “condos for Mexicans.”76 This outbreak provided confirmation, at least to those who favor further restrictions on immigration, of the dangers of reducing border vigilance, and, correspondingly, the necessity of implementing border technologies. Notably, in April 2009 when the first cases received increasing notoriety, congressman and Homeland Security Committee member Eric Massa urged that the entire two-thousand-mile border be closed: “The public needs to be aware of the serious threat of swine flu, and we need to close our borders to Mexico immediately and completely until this is resolved.”77 The surgical mask lends visibility to such demands; its function as a barrier technology exercises symbolically on the face of its wearers the closing of territorial borders called for in these demands. Indeed, the barriers that constrain movement across checkpoints, such as the border at Tijuana, are visually echoed in the masks worn by those who would seek to migrate through this fraught site. Ironically, those who are vulnerable to stigmatization and racialization seem eager to wear this disfiguring sign. Since the modern inception of citizenship in the wake of the French Revolution, the subjects who lay claim to the intertwined political, civil, and social rights associated with that status tend to be bound by, or excluded from, the territorial parameters of the nation-state. This emphasis on territoriality has recently been challenged, however. In her study of the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, Adriana Petryna posits that the concept of biological citizenship helps mediate claims on behalf of and by victims and survivors based on an embodied, rather than territorially delineated, subjectivity. Approaches to rights on the basis of biological citizenship, Nikolas Rose elaborates, constitute individual and collectivizing citizenship projects alternately in collaboration with, and in opposition to, the biopolitical techniques of governmentality that, in assessing, managing, and evaluating such claims, convert the discourse of valuing life into the consumerist model of biovalue.78 Although concepts of state-based, territorially bounded citizenship have often incorporated the biological—the most notorious of which are the eugenics experiments of the 1930s and 1940s in Germany—as Rose and

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Carlos Rova point out, the significance of biological citizenship in its present formulation is its foregrounding of the vulnerability of “bare life,” a concept theorized by Giorgio Agamben and others.79 While the body’s shared fragility is increasingly acknowledged (even if through contestation of what this fragility connotes) across disparate geographic sites and, notably, beyond the territorial constraints of the nation-state, periods of crisis such as the SARS outbreak mark a return to the boundaries associated with this earlier conception of citizenship. If biological citizenship constitutes an emergent cultural form, to borrow Raymond Williams’s helpful term, state-based articulations of citizenship constitute its persistent residual complement. The mask can be seen to exert on the body, as a form of externalized self-regulation—in the guise of an etiquette developed for the purposes of disease prevention and protection—the retrenchment of territoriality that occurs on a geopolitical scale. As with SARS, the still-emergent conceptualization of biological citizenship, with its collectivizing potential for activism on the basis of a shared value for the vulnerability of bare life, confronts its limits in demands for the crackdown that marks the retrenchment of the territorially bounded approach to citizenship that this more recent formulation of citizenship is thought to challenge. The subtle face discourse that attended representations of SARS, and that inscribed on the seemingly illegible body of mask wearers an unmistakable if subtle Sino-sign, proves, in the representations of swine flu, to be ingeniously adaptable and highly portable. If the specifically Asiatic cast of “yellow” fails to fit swine flu, the more general category of race into which it falls can be seen to mold itself to suit this new form of contagion. It is perhaps no surprise that the Mexican emergence of the disease unsettled epidemiologists, who were looking for the origins of a new pandemic in Asia. In narratives about the swine flu, the mask may not function as a Sino-sign, but it still casts itself in racial terms all the more pernicious because they are not explicitly named as such. While the mask’s function as Sino-sign serves to diagnose SARS as a “yellow fever,” a millennial contagion as it were, in its swine flu incarnation, the mask’s ambiguity makes it an endlessly capacious signifier. Once again, however, the mask’s excesses are discernible not just in the restrictive responses that its shielding function anticipates and extends. In this crisis as well, the surgical mask is a screen on which desires for survival, for a script of countercontagion, are projected. And once more, the narrative most readily available for these purposes is the melodrama of love, a defiant intimacy. Photo essays headlined “Love in the Time of Swine Flu” (an allusion to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, which itself probably unintentionally links disease to Latino subjectivity in the minds of Anglo North Americans) feature lovers’ lingering caresses and their

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Figure 4.6  Quick Embrace. (Photo by Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty.)

fixed mutual regard, and, as always, the closeness conferred by the close-up remains a favored technique for illustrating a boundary-shattering intimacy, paradoxically framed within the cropped confines of the photographers’ gaze (Figure  4.6). Between the openness of the lovers’ determined gaze and the enclosure of the photograph’s determining confines is a narrow space of selfdefinition and life affirmation. This affirmation, however, was refuted when the WHO “upgraded” H1N1’s status to a level five pandemic, signaling not the lethality but rather the geopolitical reach of the disease. The territorial terms with which debates on proper modes of containment—which Mexicanized the disease and sought, among belligerent protectionist quarters, to find within this outbreak further fuel for arguments to tighten the already militarized U.S.-Mexico border as a means of restricting immigration—could no longer capture the popular imagination once the truly dire but somehow more reassuring (because it was “normalizing”) prognosis, that the disease had spread beyond the possibility of containment, had been accepted. Instead, this feature of the etiquette of hygiene appears to have deferred to ostensibly more medically efficacious techniques, scrupulous hand washing, polite sneeze comportment, and, most recently, the potential avoidance of the handshake. Yet while social distancing thus seems to be a resounding theme in public health discourse, the discernible

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shift from the face to the hands as dangerous zones of contact has not wholly dispelled the mask’s mystique. Despite no longer claiming a disproportionate share of visual culture of H1N1, the mask is still often seen at airports, where borders are most tangibly negotiated and where bodies are fearfully, yet defiantly, in transit. The far-flung and diverse subjects constituted as a consequence of this practice of civility, in accordance with a faith, however misguided, in the efficacy of hygienic self-regulation, in turn challenges not only the coherence of the nation-state’s territorial boundaries but also the coalitions that sustain Asian American communities.

Postscript The Inhospitable Politics of Repatriation

I

n 1999, seventeen-year-old Kim Ho Ma and two friends, members of a Khmer gang in Seattle, Washington, were convicted of manslaughter in the shooting death of a rival gang member. Ma was sentenced to thirty-three months in a correctional facility. Yet even after serving his time, he remained incarcerated at an immigration detention center. His punishment continued; shortly afterward, he was deported to Cambodia, a country he did not know, having escaped with his mother as a refugee when he was only seven. Nearly three years after his mug shot was taken, another photograph, part of his Cambodian repatriation papers, thus completed a process of identificatory transformation that began with the transit photograph (likely taken as part of the refugee camp’s processing procedure) and ignominiously ended with the criminal portrait. Although the two photographs, the mug shot and the refugee transit photograph appear distinct, in form—and even in function—they are perhaps more alike than critics have recognized. In addition to documentary photographs, the transit photo is one of the most common representations of refugees and functions not only as a means of identifying these mobile subjects but also as a condition of entry into the United States. In this manner, it seems wholly dissimilar from the mug shot. The latter is used as a means of categorizing and identifying the criminal; when it comes to Cambodian returnees, the mug shot is also associated with the process of deportation from the United States. And yet, despite these opposing functions, there are nevertheless formal similarities between the mug shot and the transit photo that suggest, in turn, a complex triangulation between the refugee, the returnee, and the citizen. Stateless and caught between nations,

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the refugee exposes the unstable limits of the concept of citizenship. As a “bad subject,” the criminal refugee is the specter of deviancy that haunts the model minority and, as such, serves as the uncivil underside to the civility that is the ostensible hallmark of cultural citizenship in the United States. What accounts for this dramatic reversal from offering refuge to demanding deportation, from a politics of hospitality to one of repatriation? This postscript explores the civil dimensions of hospitality, the principle that undergirds refugee and repatriation policies. Southeast Asian refugees have historically received a fraught welcome within the United States. In fact, they first arrived in large numbers in the waves of immigration that followed the 1965 passage of the Hart-Celler Act, when race-based exclusions were finally lifted. The implications of this change were most acutely felt in Asian American communities in the following decades, when the United States effectively opened its borders, receiving in the 1970s and 1980s a steady stream of refugees from Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. While this hospitality is hardly unprecedented (the United States had long defined itself as a haven for refugees), what set it apart was not only the sheer number of bodies that were able to transit from various sites of detention (such as the labor camp under Pol Pot’s genocidal regime where Ma was born, and the refugee camp in Thailand where he spent his early years) to “freedom” in the United States. Although this long-standing rhetoric of hospitality had been belied at pivotal historical moments, most notoriously during World War II when a ship with Jewish asylum seekers was turned away, during the 1970s and 1980s especially, this rhetoric finally seemed to be realized. And yet, despite the fact that refugees now seemed welcome, the extent of this welcome turned out to be limited. Although the principle of welcoming—and the civility that attends it—is the basis of Immanuel Kant’s definition of cosmopolitanism as the right to hospitality, the equivocal terms of this gesture occasion uncertainty about the relationship between hosts and guests. As Jacques Derrida argues, hospitality is haunted by the specter of hostility or “hostipitality.”1 Civility is shadowed by incivility. Cambodians such as Kim Ho Ma and his family were selected for resettlement in the United States during a time of extraordinary political goodwill. Widespread reports of disease and starvation at camps located along the Thai border dramatically exposed the dire conditions in which refugees lived and died. Public sympathy converged with the interests of politicians, whose vitriolic anticommunism largely fueled refugee policy at the time, so that most of those granted asylum in the United States were fleeing China, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and Cambodia. As Sucheng Chan notes,

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Seeing refugee-seekers pouring out of Vietnam itself, as well as out of Vietnam-dominated Laos and Cambodia, helped justify ex post facto America’s military involvement in those countries. In other words, refugee-seekers were the clearest indication of the oppressiveness of communist regimes and the correctness of American foreign policy during the Vietnam wars.2 Similarly, Yen Le Espiritu contends that refugee policy constitutes a “we-win-even-when-we-lose” syndrome, a means of ensuring moral victory in spite of military defeat in Vietnam.3 As a consequence of this convergence of compassion and anticommunist sentiment, between 1975 and 1994, 157,518 Cambodians arrived in the United States under three categories: 2,518 as humanitarian and public interest parolees, 6,335 as immigrants, and 148,665 as refugees. Within the Cold War context, refugees were constructed as innocent victims, deserving of rescue, and on arrival in the United States, many of them, particularly the ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, quickly transitioned into model minorities. The process was far from smooth, however, and critics soon drew attention to the “achievement gap” evident within Southeast Asian communities, including those from Cambodia, among the poorest of these newly settled groups. Besides their poverty, Cambodian Americans also drew unwelcome attention for high rates of crime, especially in the 1990s when gang warfare rocked Los Angeles neighborhoods. Youths were especially at risk in urban communities into which their families had settled, and many turned to gangs for protection and camaraderie, participating in petty crimes ranging from theft to extortion of small-business owners in ethnic communities. By these measures, it was clear that while Cambodians may have been selected for resettlement in the United States, they were by no means comfortably integrated within American society. In addition to expected forms of intervention—increased surveillance of ethnic enclaves and social initiatives designed to discourage gang activities—shifts in immigration policy signaled a change in perspective. Whereas refugees previously received a warm welcome, so-called compassion fatigue exhausted this policy of openness. Under the auspices of a controversial repatriation law enacted soon afterward in 1996, some of these refugees faced deportation. While the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) applied to all felons who were permanent resident aliens, a number of them from such countries as Vietnam, Cuba, and Cambodia, with whom the United States had yet to negotiate repatriation agreements, were not deported.4 But after a secret repatriation agreement between the United States and Cambodia in

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2002, negotiated within a post-9/11 period of heightened border control, convicted felons of Cambodian descent were thus subject to a double punishment, “sentenced home” (as one documentary puts it)5 even after serving the terms of their criminal sentencing because as permanent resident aliens—and thus noncitizens—their protections were limited.6 Not only was this community among the poorest in Asian America (their youth often turned to gangs for protection in the blighted urban enclaves into which their families had settled); they also had received little support in the resettlement process. Against this backdrop, the IIRIRA can be seen as a gatekeeping measure.7 Though the act had a broad mandate, it came to have special consequences for the Cambodian American community, precisely because this community was so vulnerable. While some deportees, like Kim Ho Ma, had committed violent crimes causing death or injury, other felons were repatriated for less severe offenses. For instance, Louen Lun, one deportee, caught the attention of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) when he applied for citizenship in 2002. A conviction for assault (he had shot a gun in a crowded shopping mall while being chased by gang members) meant he too was deportable. Deportation orders were carried out despite the fact that his crime was committed eight years earlier (that is, before the passage of IIRIRA); despite the fact that no one was hurt; despite the fact that he had served his sentence and since then had been a “model citizen” (without reoffending); and despite the fact that he was a hardworking father with two children to support. Rather, these were irrelevant details, for IIRIRA does not take into account rehabilitation or any other factors besides citizenship status and the conviction of a deportable offense. It would seem that the welcome afforded in the United States to refugees like Ma and Lun—one of tens of thousands from Southeast Asia who embarked on harrowing journeys in the wake of humanitarian crises sparked by Cold War violence in the Pacific theater—was effectively over.

From the Model Minority to the Bad Subject Though the “bad subject” is the obverse of the model minority that rarely appears in Asian American scholarship, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s timely theorization of the politics of resistance stands out as a notable exception. Drawing from Louis Althusser’s intriguing though underdeveloped concept of the bad subject—one who directly opposes ideological state apparatuses and thus incurs the intervention of repressive state apparatuses8 —Nguyen suggests that this figure functions as part of a discursive challenge to the model minority; this is problematic, he argues, because it assumes an ideologically homogenous position that cannot take adequate account of the Asian American community’s political heterogeneity.9 In his critique of the discourse of resistance in

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Asian American studies, Nguyen contends that the “bad subject” is a recurring figure that creates an ideological homogeneity that does a disservice to the heterogeneity of Asian American cultural production and politics. In invoking the “bad subject” here, however, I provide a deliberately eccentric consideration of this figure that is framed not, as Nguyen characterizes it, through the lens of a pedagogy of resistance, but rather through the juridical process of criminalization. Doing so is necessary for providing a historically specific account of injustice that nuances the concept of citizenship. Returning to Althusser’s parable of interpellation that informs Nguyen’s own interpretation of the bad subject, we may recall that the call to subjectivity is made by a policeman, agent of the law: the subject who turns as well as the one who refuses to turn is identified within this ideological state apparatus. In fact, the construction of the bad subject is an integral means by which the refugee is transformed from a sympathetic figure deserving of sanctuary to one who is undeserving; who needs to be expelled because of the risks he or she poses to hosts who construe themselves as hapless hostages. While the shift from host to hostage is doubtless unsettling, it is not surprising; as Derrida notes, any welcome carries an inherent risk. Though the concept of hospitality turns out to be in this way contradictory (so that, as noted previously, hospitality is shadowed by its inadequacy to enact fully the ideal of unreserved welcome of the stranger, and the civility of hospitality is subtended by the incivility of its breach), the shift from refugee to bad subject/criminal is nevertheless dramatic. What accounts for this transformation? The overlapping of criminal and refugee subjectivities seems remarkable, if not unexpected, in light of Hannah Arendt’s famous definition of human rights as the “right to have rights,”10 and its signal importance for the refugee, whose need is profound because this figure exists outside the law and is therefore unable to claim the rights that can only be protected and sanctioned by the nation-state. Moreover, Arendt argues, as a stateless person, the refugee who is “an anomaly for whom the general law did not provide” is unlike the criminal who, by contrast, is recognized by the law.11 In this regard, the refugee is marked by a “condition of rightlessness,”12 a condition that Arendt explains is dangerously uncertain because the calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion, formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities—but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are equal before the law, but that no law exists for them, not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them.13

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As a mark of the refugee’s profound vulnerability, Arendt goes so far as to posit that if the refugee were to transgress the law, he or she would paradoxically only improve rather than degrade his or her condition, for doing so would at least result in the attainment of legal legibility. Though by no means in an enviable condition, the criminal is at least a subject, whereas, as a stateless person, the refugee is a political nonsubject, insofar as he or she cannot claim citizenship rights that are the purview of the nation-state. Although Arendt’s consideration of the paradox of legality and rights that distinguishes the refugee from the criminal addresses the humanitarian crisis specifically marked by the Holocaust, her analysis has broader implications. The drafting of international statements on human rights, not to mention their ratification by nation-states, can be seen as a means of addressing the problem of statelessness and rightlessness. The United Nations Conventions Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951), for instance, helpfully defines the refugee as an exile from a nation who, fearing persecution from that nation, cannot avail itself of its protection; such a definition enables other states to establish humanitarian bases for offering asylum.14 Arendt’s juxtaposition of the criminal and the refugee sheds light on recent developments in U.S. law that effectively criminalizes the refugee—a process that reverses her formulation in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Instead of attaining rights through transgression of the law, the alien felon—a former refugee—in fact irrevocably loses rights through this transgression. As the ultimate penalty, deportation marks the moment when criminal identity lays bare the tenuousness of the refugee’s welcome. Rather than merely meeting or overlapping in the spectrum of rights, the criminal and the Cambodian refugee today potentially share an uncomfortable, indeed infelicitous, identity. The identification of the refugee as criminal, specifically as alien felon, helps erase the former category and any claims to compassionate, humane treatment that could otherwise be made on its behalf. This unsettling connection between the criminal and the refugee finds visual expression in disturbing similarities between the mug shot and transit and identity photographs. In the nineteenth century, the mug shot emerged almost immediately after the inception of photography in 1839 as a means of surveilling populations. As Jonathan Finn puts it, “photographic representation was seized upon by social institutions, including law enforcement agencies, for the documentation and administration of the body.”15 With its origins in the traditions of portraiture described in Chapter 1, the mug shot rapidly developed conventions that are recognizable even today. Such photographs are “frontal, clear, showing head and shoulders, and, where possible, with no facial expression.”16

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Although mug shots and refugee ID photographs of returnees are not, to my knowledge, publicly available, the linkage between these two types of photographs (evoking, in turn, the conceptual affinity between the refugee and the criminal) is suggested within the archive of Cambodian American refugees included in the recent exhibition More Than a Number. Organized by the nonprofit group Light of Cambodian Children, Inc., More Than a Number spotlights the remarkable story of Cambodian Americans, tracking their journeys of escape from genocide and survival in the United States, and features more than a hundred photographs accompanied with oral testimonies. Among these photographs are black-and-white photographs, taken by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as a means of processing refugees (they are usually prefaced with the letters KD and followed by numbers that indicated the order in which they appeared at the camp) (Figure P.1). These initials on the refugee ID photos indicated the name of the camp and were followed by numbers that specified how many people were contained in the household, enabling administrators to determine the rations required to sustain the camp population. These photographs helped facilitate the camp’s biopolitical mission of facilitating life. The transit photographs themselves not only are a remarkable record of the influence of a general style of portraiture but also evoked, as exhibit organizers observe in their notes, an “eerie” resemblance to the surveillance photographs taken at Tuol Sleng, a notorious prison known as S-21, which the Khmer Rouge operated in Phnom Penh on the grounds of what was once a high school.17 (Because out of the seventeen thousand people known to have been imprisoned, only seven survived, S-21 could be seen as not just a prison but a death camp.) Like the S-21 portraits, the UNHCR refugee photographs tagged their subjects, posed them frontally, and featured not the affective neutrality described by Finn but rather expressions of fear. Exhibition co-organizer Sopheap Theam recalls that the Cambodian Americans who donated their transit and refugee photographs to the archive spoke of their sense of helplessness that lay behind these expressions.18 Ironically, UNHCR’s humane mission, its intervention in the bare life of the refugee, parallels in this unexpected way the surveillance of the genocidal state from which the refugee is rescued. The photographic record discloses this profoundly uneasy affinity between the refugee camp and the death camps, and, in turn, these two politically vulnerable subjects, the refugee and the criminal. To escape the trap of this binary, the exhibition provides an alternative archive of Cambodian family portraits as a means of insisting on an agential identity that is not caught between criminal and refugee. Yet the predicament faced by the Cambodian returnee is not just that he or she is irrevocably denied sanctuary and U.S. citizenship, however. Indeed, this

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Figure P.1  Detail of transit photos of Cambodian refugees included in the More Than a Number exhibition mounted by the Light of Cambodian Children community organization. The quilt that stitches together the stories of these refugees was made by the New England Quilt Museum. (Courtesy of Light of Cambodian Children, Inc.)

shadow of nonsubjectivity looms perhaps larger after repatriation. A deceptively comforting term, repatriation signifies a return to homeland. Yet this forced removal—as a sign of their criminal status, returnees are handcuffed during the long flight to Cambodia—and the ongoing discomforts that attend them make manifest how unfamiliar, not to mention how unwelcoming, home turns out to be. Returnees are not just confined while aboard their plane; once in Cambodia they often spend weeks in detention again. Moreover, if the United States offered scant services for settlement in the 1980s, Cambodia, a developing country that is among the poorest in the world, offers hardly any services to assist in resettlement. In 2002, no infrastructure was in place for returnees, who were neither American nor fully Cambodian in the country that only begrudgingly, and under immense political pressure, agreed to accept them. Worse yet, the returnees were highly visible. Because they were former gang members, their tattoos, urban attire, and aggressive swagger marked them as foreigners. For these reasons, when resettlement services began (offered by nongovernmental organizations that assumed the responsibilities that neither U.S. nor Cambodian officials wanted to

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undertake), a large part of the focus was on “rehabilitating” the criminal look, integral to producing what I would call an optics of return. Photography played an interesting role in this process. That criminals have a look or rather a typology is a commonplace of surveillance practices dating back, as I have just shown, at least as far as the late nineteenth century: the mug shot is one of the earliest biometric measures of the criminal body. On the street, because inscriptions on the body were sufficient identifying markers, organizations such as the Returnee Integration Support Program (RISP), now called the Returnee Integration Support Center (RISC), focused on visually reforming the body. Two photographs appearing in RISC’s digital “Cambodian Repatriation Survival Guide” illustrate the prominence of tattoos on returnee bodies, indelible markers of their criminal association. While acknowledging that tattoos are “not unusual” in Cambodia, unsurprisingly, RISC advises modesty in comportment and dress as effective means of successful reintegration. If returnee bodies with their criminal coding are in this way potential spectacles, repatriation requires a less visible mode of presentation, so that “survival” in the gritty streets of this developing country requires blending in rather than, as might have been the case with the gang affiliations that the tattoos denote, standing out. RISC and other organizations committed to returnee integration to Cambodia implicitly acknowledge that the political implications of deportation entail more than the irrevocable denial of the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship. As important is the means by which Cambodian citizenship, previously an uncertain, even irrelevant issue for returnees, is to be acquired. Cambodian citizenship is perhaps as jealously guarded as U.S. citizenship and, as critics prior to the 2002 repatriation agreement have noted, there was every reason to believe that an agreement would not be reached given the nation-state’s notoriously closed position on immigration, its ethnically intolerant policies, and structural challenges to claiming citizenship (a condition of repatriation, for, after all, there would need to be a homeland to return to). Acknowledging potential problems arising from being caught between states, the predicament of being stateless, RISC was quick to assure returnees that new documents attesting to citizenship status were to be issued on arrival in Cambodia. The survival guide is careful to describe these documents as the basis of establishing further identity papers in the country. Even though the “Survival Guide” notes that the “document gives no information about any past criminal record in the US . . . [it] does state that you were repatriated to Cambodia, so it is best to quickly obtain neutral ID which will be more useful.”19 This form of citizenship is shadowed by the returnee’s criminal past, which RISC would like to minimize through the production of other, neutralizing documents. At

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stake is nothing less than the production of a new subjectivity, beyond refugee and returnee. Besides the comportment of the body and the acquirement of new papers, perhaps the best means of doing so is through a civil gesture, the sampeah. In Cambodia, the bow or the sampeah is a customary form of greeting. RISC tutors returnees on Cambodian civility with a photograph, as simple illustration of how to perform the sampeah. The website features a young girl facing forward, with two hands clasped, as if in prayer, to her forehead.20 In form, the sampeah, with its clasping of hands, resembles the handshake, if only slightly. But unlike the two arms extended forward with the handshake, these hands are, with the sampeah, raised to the temple as a gesture of respect, an acknowledgment of goodwill extended to the other, who is expected to mirror and reciprocate this gesture. That RISC should picture a child performing the sampeah is significant, though perhaps ambiguous. That the returnee learns from a child how to be Cambodian, specifically by adopting the comportment appropriate to social citizenship, is apt, given that the picture draws an implicit analogy between the returnee and the child. Demonstrating how easily this gesture can be made (even a child can do it), this picture also serves as a reminder of the hierarchical organization of Cambodian society. Not only do honorifics help establish the social status of speakers in verbal exchanges, but the order in which the sampeah is performed—the one who bows first defers to the superior position of the one who bows last—also confirms this status. Yet because this mini-lesson is not just an illustration but also a performance of the sampeah, constituting a gesture of welcome for the returnee initiated by the child, honor is symbolically conferred to the returnee. The photograph illustrates effectively the ways that civility may initiate a renewal of citizenship. Through a process of visual rehabilitation, the returnee not only is welcomed by the child, but he or she may also be reborn as a child, the necessary initial stage toward social rehabilitation. Accordingly, this photograph may serve as a rejoinder to the mug shot, that criminalizing index of nonsubjectivity that, within the context of repatriation, renders the refugee stateless. The sampeah promises the returnee the possibility of a new subjectivity within Cambodia. In an understated manner, too, the sampeah thus connects civility and citizenship; the welcome it proffers provides an oblique critique of the limits of a “humanitarian” approach to hospitality and a pointed reminder that other citizenships—beyond the United States—may ultimately be integral for the construction of Asian American subjectivity. Although it may be difficult to imagine the sampeah and the handshake directly addressing each other, they nevertheless serve as apt symbols for the shifting shape of U.S. national identity, and Asian American community specifically. The handshake’s visual construction of nationhood, a process

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dependent on the labor of racialized bodies, offers a model of ideal citizenship that relies on even as it disavows the integral contributions of noncitizens. In the twenty-first century, the sampeah, this civil gesture of bittersweet homecoming extended toward the noncitizen “bad subject,” may be seen as a way of exposing the gaps and empty spaces left by the railroad engineers’ handshake in the nineteenth century. It is only fitting, then, to begin and end this book on the multifarious forms of civility and their role in shaping citizenship, by attending to these important, yet very different gestures. Across the span of these periods, and between the bodies engaged in the performance of these gestures—which never quite touch—the constituency of Asian America and its fraught relationship to U.S. citizenship is complexly formed in ways that demonstrate the delicate yet indelible relationship between homeland and adoptive lands, between national and international spaces. In different ways, the handshake and the sampeah demonstrate civility’s pivotal role in making and unmaking “model citizens.” As illustrative bookends, the handshake and sampeah thus reveal the enduring influence of civility and its inextricable connection to citizenship.

Notes

Prologue

1. See, for example, John Nichols, “Palin Put a Gun Target on Giffords’s District; Now a Colleague Says: ‘Palin Needs to Look at Her Own Behavior,’” The Nation, January 9, 2011, available at http://www.thenation.com/blog/157578/palin-put-gun-targetgiffordss-district-now-colleague-says-palin-needs-look-her-own-beha. 2. Marc Lacey and David M. Herszenhorn, “In Attack’s Wake, Political Repercussions,” New York Times, January 8, 2011, available at http://www.nytimes.com/ 2011/01/09/us/politics/09giffords.html. Among the many restrictions introduced by Senate Bill 1070 was the requirement that immigrants carry an identification card; officers were, in turn, authorized to increase surveillance of suspected undocumented workers. The law had passed on April 23, 2010. 3.  Blood libel is a term denoting the false accusation that Jews murdered children. Palin’s use of this term stirred up further controversy; in applying it she appeared unaware of its meaning and its history, instead seeming to emphasize her own victimization without regard for the fact that Congresswoman Giffords is Jewish. 4.  “Sarah Palin—Blood Libel,” LYBIO.Net, accessed May 30, 2011, available at http://lybio.net/sarah-palin-blood-libel/speeches/. 5.  “Obama Speech Addresses Tragedy in Tucson,” ABC News, January 12, 2011, available at http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obama-speech-transcript-president-addressesshooting-tragedy-tucson/story?id=12597444&page=1. 6. Ibid. 7. My deepest thanks to Pauline Wakeham for sharing her thoughts on the significance of the released and unreleased photographs. Her ideas have helped me formulate my own understanding of the discursive function of these images. 8.  This photograph can be viewed at http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/ 0,29307,2069208_2271482,00.html. 9. See, for example, Ken Johnson, “Situation: Ambiguous,” New York Times, May 7, 2011, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/weekinreview/08johnson.html.

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10.  Jason Horowitz, “Breaking Down the Situation Room Photo,” Washington Post, May 5, 2011, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/lifestyle/style/situa tion-room.html. 11.  For a fascinating theory of recoiling as an ethical response to atrocity, see Wendy Kozol, “Battlefield Souvenirs and the Affective Politics of Recoil,” Photography and Culture (forthcoming). 12.  Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004). Introduction

1. See Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989). 2. In a letter to a friend sent shortly after photographing the joining of the tracks at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869, Andrew Johnson (A. J.) Russell, who had previously documented the American Civil War, exclaimed, “The great Rail Road problem of the age is now solved. The Continental Iron Band now permanently unites distant portions of the Republic, and opens up to Commerce, Navigation and Enterprise the vast unpeopled plains and lofty mountain ranges that now divide East from West.” Quoted in Susan Danly, “Andrew Joseph Russell’s The Great West Illustrated,” in The Railroad in American Art: Representations of Technological Change, ed. Susan Danly and Leo Marx (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 93–112. 3. Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin, two writers whose perspectives frequently clash, both reflect on the absence of Chinese laborers from this nationally pivotal moment. As David Eng notes, their books provide a counterhistory that contests photography’s paralyzing tendency to foreground the “given-to-be-seen” (Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001], 42), visual culture’s overdetermined fixity. The significance of the theme of exclusion similarly concerns Anna Pegler-Gordon, who observes that A. J. Russell’s iconic photograph offers a powerful visual metaphor for the exclusion laws that, with the exception of a small number of students, diplomats, and exempted groups, severely restricted Chinese immigration. See Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (New York: Knopf, 1980); Frank Chin, Donald Duk: A Novel (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1991); Eng, Racial Castration; and Anna Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 4.  Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America, 22. 5. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (1969; Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1992); Emmanuel Levinas, “On Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty,” in Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 96–103; and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” in The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 130–155. On the handshake in the work of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, see also Rosalyn Diprose, “The Ethics and Politics of the Handshake: Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Nancy,” in Difficult Justice: Commentaries on Levinas and Politics, ed. Asher Horo­ witz and Gad Horowitz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 221–245. 6.  “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese,” Life, December 22, 1941, 81–83. The phrase “Handbook for Americans” served as a heading for the article, along with an

Notes to the Introduction  161

accompanying article, “How to Identify Japanese Planes,” in the issue’s table of contents. Life has, unfortunately, refused permission to reproduce this article. However, a copy of it can be viewed at http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/foster/lifemag .htm. 7. Ibid. 8.  “America Goes to War,” Life, December 22, 1941, 13. Since 1924, exclusion laws banning immigration and naturalization ensured that citizenship remained an unattainable status for Chinese and Japanese Americans. 9.  Claire Jean Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian American,” in Asian Americans and Politics: Perspectives, Experiences, Prospects, ed. Gordon H. Chang (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2001), 39–78. 10. Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). 11.  William Petersen, “Success Story, Japanese-American Style,” New York Times Magazine, January 9, 1966, 21. 12.  Aihwa Ong, Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 13.  Within this context, exemplarity serves as the standard by which, as Ronald Takaki has noted, paraphrasing Michel Foucault’s theory of surveillance and self-regulation, the state “discipline[s] and punish[es]” its minorities, so that the success of Asian Americans, or select groups of Asian Americans (in particular, Japanese Americans, who are spotlighted in Petersen’s article), are held up as the standard to which other minorities, especially African Americans, are to aspire and against which their failures are set into harsh relief. Just as important, the model minority is awarded official approval and symbolically enfolded within the grasp of the citizenship. See Ronald Takaki, “Race as a Site of Discipline and Punish,” in Privileging Positions: The Sites of Asian American Studies, ed. Gary Y. Okihiro et al. (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995), 335–348. 14.  David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 171. 15.  Ong, Buddha Is Hiding. 16.  Tomo Hattori, “Model Minority Discourse and Asian American Jouis-Sense,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (1999): 228. Hattori argues that this system emerged “from the institutions of multiculturalism that use racialized human subjects as tools for the advancement of a civil society under capitalism” (228–229). 17. Victor Bascara, Model Minority Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 1; and Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 18. Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 19. See Lye, America’s Asia. 20.  Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan, “Racist Love,” in Seeing through Shuck, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 65–79. 21. Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 145. 22. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

162 Notes to the Introduction

23. Lye, America’s Asia, 5. 24. See Edward C. Banfield, ed., Civility and Citizenship in Liberal Democratic Societies (New York: Paragon House, 1992); Benet Davetian, Civility: A Cultural History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); and Charles R. Kesler, “The Promise of American Citizenship,” in Immigration and Citizenship in the 21st Century, ed. Noah M. J. Pickus (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 3–40. 25.  Daniel Okimoto, “The Intolerance of Success,” in Roots: An Asian American Reader, ed. Amy Tachiki et al. (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1971), 15. 26. Susan Herbst, Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 4. 27.  Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 115. 28. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978). 29.  Daniel Coleman, White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 11. See also Coleman, “From Contented Civility to Contending Civilities: Alternatives to Canadian White Civility,” International Journal of Canadian Studies 38 (2008): 221–242. 30.  Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 38. 31.  David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 44. 32. Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 204. 33.  Coleman, White Civility, 9. 34.  Homi K. Bhabha, “Sly Civility,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 93–102. 35. Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz, “Introduction: On Being Becoming,” in Etiquette: Reflections on Contemporary Comportment, eds. Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), 2. 36. Ibid., 1. 37. See William Henry Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 38.  As Elizabeth Abel points out in her important study of segregation’s racial symbolics, the civil rights movement’s direct action strategies—emblematized by the sit-inners’ “carefully designed corporeal signs of comportment, grooming, and posture”—drew from this unshakable faith in civility’s political efficacy (Sign of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010], 252). In this context, seemingly innocuous practices, such as the exchange of pleasantries on a sun-drenched southern porch, bell hooks insists, can constitute a “small everyday place of antiracist resistance, a place where I practice the etiquette of civility” (“A Place Where the Soul Can Rest,” in Etiquette: Reflections on Contemporary Comportment, ed. Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007], 177). 39. Elizabeth Abel, “Skin Tone: Race and the Political Affect of the Carnal Medium,” paper presented at the Feeling Photography conference, Toronto, October

Notes to the Introduction  163

2009. My deepest thanks and gratitude to Elizabeth Abel for her comments on my manuscript and for her generous feedback. Her ideas about the phenomenology of racial flesh have helped me in rethinking civility and civil rights. 40. Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining.” 41.  Although the hands featured in “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” only clasp its own or another’s hand, the protesters’ demonstration pushes beyond Merleau-Ponty’s focus on a singular handshake as the icon for community. The grasping and intertwining of a potentially limitless number of hands amounts to a radical redefinition of community, one that is predicated on its resistant constitution against the forces (represented in the white bodies in the foreground and background who keep their hands tightly to themselves) determined to tear it asunder. Although the struggle for civil rights within this frozen moment appears to position black subjects solely against white opponents, as Abel shows, the white journalists who often took such photographs acted as proxies for northern liberal sympathizers; indeed, their cameras extended this invitation to a larger group. 42.  As numerous historians have shown, the Asian American movement rode the coattails of the civil rights movement. See William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), and Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). 43.  Pauline Wakeham, “The Cunning of Reconciliation,” in Transcanada II, ed. Smaro Kamboureli (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming). 44.  Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 45.  Trent H. Hamann, “Impolitics: Toward a Resistant Comportment,” in Etiquette: Reflections on Contemporary Comportment, ed. Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), 59–68. 46. See Lincoln Cushing, “A Brief History of the ‘Clenched Fist’ Image,” Docs Populi, January 25, 2006, last updated November 3, 2011, available at http://www.docs populi.org/articles/Fist.html. 47.  Theories of photography’s instrumental uses draw on Michel Foucault’s insights on the disciplinary function of discourse and have accordingly insisted that photographic meanings are not fixed within the image but rather constructed through its institutional circulations. See especially John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); and Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter, 1986): 3–64. 48.  John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 49. Introduced as a measure that deferred to political pressure stemming from Yellow Peril hysteria, the Page Law inaugurated a mandate to see and thereby know Asians as prospective immigrants, so that the law and the compilation of a visual archive to which it gave rise constituted a means of restricting immigration. To this extent, photography served as a powerful scopic technique that, beginning in the nineteenth century, was most rigorously exercised on Chinese bodies and, into the twentieth century, was increasingly deployed to surveil other Asian bodies within the United States. See PeglerGordon, In Sight of America.

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50. See Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli (New York: Zone Books, 2008). 51.  Photography theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes tend to consider the haptic and the optic, respectively, in terms of the tactile qualities of the photograph and especially in terms of the sensory concerns of the photographer, whose fascination with the camera eye often leads to a material distancing from the scene that this eye records. Perhaps the most famous formulation of this distinction is offered by Walter Benjamin, who observes that while photography signaled the potential for liberation in manifold ways, at the most basic level it “freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflection, ed. Hannah Arendt [New York: Schocken Books, 1968], 219). 52. Eng, Racial Castration, 42. 53. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). 54.  Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). 55.  To speak of an iconic image may in this regard be erroneous, and I do so, taking my cue from no less authoritative a source than the National Archives, with some reservation, risking the reinstatement of the myth of an authorizing eye in order to highlight the contradictions of the visual tropes within Russell’s fascinating perspective. 56.  Displayed among many other visual artifacts in the digital museum of the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR), this stereograph is meant to debunk what the website describes as the “myth” of Chinese exclusion from the Golden Spike ceremony. The digital museum is, characteristically, celebratory in its discussion of Chinese contributions and insists that while A. J. Russell’s stereograph may be the only existing record of their presence at the festivities, it nevertheless corroborates accounts that insist the labor of Chinese coolies were honored as much as their Irish-American counterparts. See “Chinese-American Contribution to Transcontinental Railroad,” Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum, last modified August 9, 2011, available at http://cprr .org/Museum/Chinese.html. 57.  Popular in the nineteenth century, the stereograph consisted of a paired set of images taken by a single photographer and which usually depicted exotic, foreign scenes. See Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic Monthly 3, no. 20 (June 1859): 738–748. 58. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Flamingo, 1981). 59. See Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 60. See Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); and John S. W. Park, Elusive Citizenship: Immigration, Asian Americans, and the Paradox of Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2004). 61.  Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” in Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 19. 62.  Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 78. 63. See, for example, Sekula, “The Body and the Archive”; Tagg, The Burden of Representation; Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame; and Jonathan Finn, Capturing the ­Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

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64. See Benedict R. O’G Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Editions and NLB, 1983). 65. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive.” 66. Elena Tajima Creef, Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (New York: New York University Press, 2004). 67.  Jasmine Alinder, Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 68.  Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (1991; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 5. 69. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

chapter 1

1. Lily Cho, “Citizenship and the Bonds of Affect: The Passport Photograph,” Photography and Culture 2, no. 3 (2009): 275–287. I am deeply grateful to Lily for her wonderful insights on the passport photo, which have inspired much of my approach to visual representation during the exclusion period. 2.  The State Department outlines passport photo requirements on its website. See “Passport Photo Requirements,” Bureau of Consular Affairs, U.S. Department of State, accessed April 14, 2011, available at http://travel.state.gov/passport/pptphotoreq/pptpho toreq_5333.html. 3.  John Torpey argues that, ironically, the invention of the passport served the purposes of restricting rather than facilitating the mobility of citizens. See John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 4.  Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989). 5.  A recent scandal erupted over the treatment of Suaad Hagi Muhammad, who was detained in Kenya because border officials claimed that she did not match her passport photograph. 6.  Torpey, Invention of the Passport. For more on the passport’s history, see Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 7.  Anna Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 8. Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 9.  Page Act (Sect. 141, 18 Stat. 477, 1873–March 1875). 10. Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 195. 11. Ibid., 198. 12. See, for example, Lauren Berlant, ed., Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 13.  Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter, 1986): 3–64.

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14.  For an interesting discussion of Genthe’s portrayal of the community, see Emma J. Teng, “Artifacts of a Lost City: Arnold Genthe’s Pictures of Old Chinatown and Its Intertexts,” in Re/collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Josephine Lee, Imogene L. Kim, and Yuko Matsukawa (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 54–77. 15. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 16.  Fae Myenne Ng, Bone (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). 17.  Will Irwin and Arnold Genthe, Pictures of Old Chinatown (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1908). 18.  Arnold Genthe, As I Remember (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1936), 32. 19.  Arnold Genthe, “A Critical View of the Salon Pictures,” Camera Craft, February 1901, 115. 20. In this regard also, the embrace of a Pictorialist style can be seen, Sekula points out, as a disavowal of the repressive implications of bourgeois portraiture at a period when the two styles, instrumental realism and bourgeois self-presentation, increasingly overlapped to form the shadow archive, suggesting that the “protomodernism of the Photo Secession and its affiliated movements [such as Pictorialism] . . . can be seen as an attempt to resist the archival mode through a strategy of avoidance and denial based on craft production” (“The Body and the Archive,” 58). 21. Elsewhere, Genthe frowns on the practice of retouching in general, conceding its usefulness only in moderation. See Arnold Genthe, “Rebellion in Photography,” Overland Monthly 38, no. 2 (1901): 92–96. 22.  His apprentice, Dorothea Lange, would later comment of him, “He was a roué, a real roué” (qtd. in Dorothea Lange, “The Making of a Documentary Photographer,” interview by Suzanne Riess, 1968, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, n.p.). 23.  On the question of Chinese prostitutes in the United States from a labor perspective, see Lucie Cheng Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1979): 3–29. For a discussion of the discursive limits of the Chinese prostitute, see also Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 24.  Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved.” 25.  Feminist scholars have attempted to theorize the female flaneur. See Deborah L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000). 26.  Arnold Genthe wrote admiringly of the Mission Home and director, noting that Miss Cameron “was not a tight-lipped reformer who wished to make the world over into a monotone. She had respect and admiration for the art and literature of China and she saw that the girls she had taken under her wing were educated in its tradition” (qtd. in Mildred Crowl Martin, Chinatown’s Angry Angel: The Story of Donaldina Cameron [Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books, 1977], 121). 27.  The less honorific term suggests either an intimate relationship or, more subtly, a form of name-calling. The more vulgar reference to mother, Lo Mo, could signal the girls’ attempt to establish their distance from Cameron. 28.  Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

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29. See Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 30.  Joan L. Severa, Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashions, 1840–1900 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1995). 31. Martin, Chinatown’s Angry Angel, 37. 32.  Although little evidence remains of the latter term, frequent denunciations of its unseemliness are suggestive, Tom Gunning speculates. The possible “detective” functions of the handheld camera connoted scandal, and thus efforts to secure photography as a respectable hobby and legitimate art required the denial of clandestine uses that might offend Victorian sensibilities. As Gunning observes in his remarks on the relationship between documentary film and development of the handheld camera, there was another term designating this important innovation, the “detective camera”—a term that quickly, and tellingly, was suppressed. Contemporaneous uses of hidden cameras, in celebrating the surreptitiousness of record making, seem to reverse this initial disavowal. It is beyond the scope of this discussion, however, to explore the stakes in burying the history of a perspective that has since been legitimized. See Tom Gunning, “Embarrassing Evidence: The Detective Camera and the Documentary Impulse,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 46–64. 33.  Genthe, As I Remember, 34–35. 34.  Anthony W. Lee, Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 35.  John Kuo Wei Tchen, Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown (New York: Dover, 1984), 11. 36. Elaine H. Kim, Margo Machida, and Charon Mizota, eds., Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Visual Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 37.  Peter Palmquist, “Asian Photographers in San Francisco, 1850–1930,” The Argonaut: Journal of the San Francisco Historical Society 9, no. 2 (1998): 86–107. 38.  An article focusing on a resourceful Chinese inventor mentions Mrs. Tape’s contributions in making lighting plates. See “Our Chinese Edison,” San Francisco Examiner, August 4, 1888. 39.  Tape v. Hurley, 66 Cal. 473 (1885). 40. Ibid. 41.  Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). 42.  Quoted in Franklin Odo, ed., The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 73. 43. See “Chay Yune,” July 31, 1866, Shew’s Pioneer Gallery, San Francisco. 44.  One exhibition featured photographs by C. D. Hoy, “a Chinese-Canadian photographer whose startling, evocative portraits of First Nations, Chinese and Caucasian subjects in small-town British Columbia, taken between 1909 and 1920, form an important historical and cultural document about the roots of ‘otherness’ in Canada.” Quoted from the jacket cover of Faith Moonsang, First Son: Portraits of C. D. Hoy (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2000). 45. Indeed, a mid-twentieth-century advertisement in a local Chinese-language newspaper suggests that other studios such as Quong Chun and Co. picked up where these earlier companies may have left off. See Chinaworld, March 1, 1917. 46.  Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America, 58.

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47.  Chinese portrait photography adapts Western technologies and blends Eastern traditions. The sometimes unsettling but nevertheless distinctive frontal gaze, symmetry, and stillness of Chinese subjects derive from the iconic pose associated with commemorative portraiture. See Jan Stuart and Evelyn S. Rawski, Worshipping the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2001); and Richard Ellis Vinogrand, Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits, 1600–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Recently scholars have begun to question the relationship between these two traditions in the development of Chinese photography, pointing out that conventions are sometimes projections on the part of Western photographers during the nineteenth century in select port cities, while other critics have suggested that an indigenous photographic practice may have been established independently of Western influence. See Jeffrey W. Cody and Frances Terpak, eds., Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), especially Edwin K. Lai’s essay “The History of the Camera Obscura and Early Photography in China,” 19–32, and Wu Hung’s essay “Inventing a ‘Chinese’ Portrait Style in Early Photography: The Case of Milton Miller,” 69–90. 48.  Wing Tek Lum and Gregory Yee Mark, “Poem and Family Portraits,” Amerasia Journal 27, no. 2 (2001): 50–61. 49.  Though On Char’s estate donated more than 70,000 photographs to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, there is little historical evidence about his practice. For a brief discussion of On Char’s significance, see John Abramson, Photographs of Old Hawaii (Norfolk Island, Australia: Island Heritage Books, 1976). 50. Lum and Mark, “Poem and Family Portraits.” 51. See Judy Yung’s oral history of Asian women in the United States, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). See also Victor Low, The Unimpressible Race: A Century of Educational Struggle by the Chinese in San Francisco (San Francisco: East/West, 1982); Mamie Tape: The Fight for Equality in Education, 1885–1995, produced, written, and directed by Loni Ding (Berkeley, CA: Center for Educational Telecommunications, 2000), DVD, 21 min.; and Mai Ngai, The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). 52. See Kem Lee, “Chinese Historical Society Speech,” September 21, 1979, Kem Lee Collection, UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library. 53.  As Roger Daniels notes, “local discrimination was transformed into an international incident” (Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988], 120). 54. I discuss the historical emergence of this term and its social significance in Chapter 4. 55. Roger Daniels explains that the Gentlemen’s Agreement did not require congressional ratification. See Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (New York: Atheneum, 1969). 56.  U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1924.I, 339– 369. 57.  Kei Tanaka explains that among the middle classes within Meiji Japan, picture marriages between Japanese men and women (who did not necessarily desire to leave Japan’s shores) were recognized as valid in the nineteenth century. A social practice that

Notes to Chapter 2  169

blended the traditional (marital unions based on practical rather than romantic considerations) and the innovative (photography as a means of facilitating such unions), the picture marriage was widely seen in Japan as a hallmark of modernity that gave rise, in turn, to visual codes of self-representation. Shortly afterward, members of the working class also engaged in this popular practice. The picture marriage became a means of joining a broad spectrum of eligible candidates within Japan and, eventually, between Japan and Japanese nationals living in the United States. Whereas for men such coding meant posing in ways that signified material success, usually through wearing Western dress or posing near symbols of affluence, for women it meant balancing a “modern” image (also through dress that drew on Westernized styles of wearing the traditional kimono, in contrast to the invocation of traditional dress in Genthe’s portraits of Chinese girls and women) with a pleasing modesty. See Kei Tanaka, “Marriage as Citizen’s Privilege: Japanese Picture Marriage and American Social Justice,” Nanzan Review of American Studies 31 (2009): 131–150. 58.  For an account of the cultural significance of the Gentlemen’s Agreement, see Jordan Sand, “Gentlemen’s Agreement, 1908: Fragments for a Pacific History,” Representations 107 (Summer 2009): 91–121. 59. See Franklin S. Odo and Kasuko Sinoto, A Pictorial History of the Japanese in Hawaii, 1885–1924 (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1985). 60.  Tanaka, “Marriage as Citizen’s Privilege.” 61. Sand, “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” 104. 62.  John Gage, “Photographic Likeness,” in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 119. 63. See Won K. Yoon, The Passage of a Picture Bride (Riverside, CA: Loma Linda University Press, 1989). 64.  “Issei/Kibei Experience,” April 6, 1973, Oral History Project, O.H. 1272, University of California at Fullerton, 13. Histories of picture brides also appear in Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885–1923 (London: Collier Macmillan, 1988); and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). 65.  Tanaka, “Marriage as Citizen’s Privilege,” 137. 66. See “Lover Rescues ‘Picture Bride,’” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 1915, 119; and “Picture-Bride Raises Rumpus, She Dares Love Man Other Than Her Husband— to Be Example,” Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1915. 67.  “General Sherill Urges Ladies Agreement in Japan as Well as Gentlemen,” Ellensburg (WA) Daily Record, December 24, 1919, 4. 68.  C. K. Hachy, “The Wifeless Japanese, ‘Picture Brides’ Are No More for Them and They Are Sad,” New York Times, July 22, 1922, 6. 69. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive.” 70. See, for example, “U.S. Will Deliver ‘Picture Brides’ from Japan to Waiting Husbands,” Washington Post, January 5, 1915, 7. chapter 2

1. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976; New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 87.

170 Notes to Chapter 2

2.  Jasmine Alinder, Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 3. Sylvia E. Danovitch, “The Past Recaptured? The Photographic Record of the Internment of Japanese-Americans,” Prologue 12, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 92. 4. Ibid., 103 (my italics). 5. See U.S. War Relocation Authority, WRA: A Story of Human Conservation, U.S. Department of the Interior (1946; New York: AMS Press, 1975). 6.  This history has been well documented. See especially Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972); and Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps (New York: Morrow, 1976). Though debates continue to rage about how best to describe the Japanese American experience during World War II, in these two landmark histories a compelling case for the use of concentration camps is made. Though I find the term apt, I refer to internment photographs, which is less stylistically awkward, though perhaps more ideologically fraught, than photographs of concentration camps. 7. Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, Say, Is This the U.S.A. (1941; New York: Da Capo Press, 1977); Eleanor Roosevelt and Francis M. Cooke MacGregor, This Is America (New York: Putnam, 1942). 8.  Angela L. Miller, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 109. 9. Rosalind Krauss has written influentially on the discursive construction of landscape, focusing on the institutionalization of “views” within museum spaces. See Rosalind E. Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42, no. 4 (1982): 311–319. For more on the landscape and ideology, see W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). A historical perspective on the subject is also provided by Alan R. H. Baker and Gideon Biger, eds., Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective: Essays on the Meanings of Some Places in the Past (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 10.  Creef provides a comprehensive account of the visual representation of Japanese America in Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (New York: New York University Press, 2004). 11. Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Japanese American Resettlement through the Lens: Hikaru Carl Iwasaki and the WRA’s Photographic Section, 1943–1945 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2009). 12.  For a helpful overview of the history of Japanese American agricultural labor, see Nobuya Tsuchida, “Japanese Gardeners in Southern California, 1900–1941,” in Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States before World War II, eds. Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 435–469. 13.  U.S. War Relocation Authority, WRA Quarterly Report, U.S. Department of the Interior, March 18–June 30, 1942, 1. 14.  The possible exception was Poston camp, where projects were meant to enrich the Heart Mountain Indian Reservation, on which the camp was built. 15.  “The Place of Agriculture in the WRA Program, March 9, 1944,” National Archives, Washington, DC, n.p. 16. E. H. Reed, “Letter to Malcolm E. Pitts, Executive Officer (Minidoka),” August 14, 1944, National Archives, Washington, DC.

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17. National Archives, Washington, DC, 210-GA-336. 18. Nancy Wynne Newhall, Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 144. 19. Ibid. 20. See Thy Phu, “The Spaces of Human Confinement: Manzanar Photography and Landscape Ideology,” JAAS 11, no. 3 (2008): 337–371. 21.  Ansel Adams, Archie Miyatake, and Wynne Benti, Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese Americans, Manzanar Relocation Center, Inyo County, California (Bishop, CA: Spotted Dog Press, 2002), n.p. 22. Ibid., n.p. 23.  Ansel Adams, “An Exposition of My Photographic Technique: Landscape.” Camera Craft 41, no. 2 (1934): 72–78. 24.  Wynne Benti, “A Note on the Photography,” in Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese Americans, Manzanar Relocation Center, Inyo County, California (Bishop, CA: Spotted Dog Press, 2002), 121. 25. Established in 1931, Group f.64 was significantly named after the smallest aperture on the lens of a large-format camera, which provided the greatest depth of field, defining what its members felt were the unique qualities of photography. A California-based movement that promoted “straight” photography—sharp images and maximum depth of field, in turn emphasized in the use of smooth, glossy paper—the group’s manifesto was positioned against the Pictorialist style of a soft-focused and artistic approach to images. See Therese Thau Heyman, Mary Street Alinder, and Naomi Rosenblum, eds., Seeing Straight: The f.64 Revolution in Photography (Oakland, CA: Oakland Museum, 1993). 26.  Quoted in Jonathan Spaulding, Ansel Adams and the American Landscape: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 119. 27.  Quoted in Karin Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1980), 141. Ohrn attributes this statement to Lange’s son, Daniel Dixon. 28.  Dorothea Lange, “The Making of a Documentary Photographer,” interview by Suzanne Riess, 1968, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 190–191. 29. Ibid., 191. 30.  Adams et al., Born Free and Equal, 17. 31. Ibid., 23. 32. See Adams et al., Born Free and Equal, 10. 33.  For a detailed analysis of Miyatake’s work, see Alinder, Moving Images. 34.  Hirabayashi, Japanese American Resettlement. 35. Ibid., 13. 36.  Charles Sterling, Still Life Painting from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 149. 37. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 13. 38.  The full caption lists “some of the fifty-two varieties of crops grown by the Agricultural Section of the Heart Mountain Center. Crops shown in this picture is as follows from left to right: Cantaloupe, eggplant, potatoes, popcorn, sweet corn, casaba melon, hubbard squash, nerima daikon, table beets, green onion, tomatoes, banana squash, carrots, dry onion, wheat, rye, cabbage, and striped watermelon.”

172 Notes to Chapter 2

39.  James W. Barker, Thanksgiving: The Biography of an American Holiday (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009). 40.  Alice Yang Murray, Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 41.  Allen Hendershott Eaton and Bruce Rogers, Beauty behind Barbed Wire: The Arts of the Japanese in Our War Relocation Camps (New York: Harper, 1952), 3. 42. Ibid., 24. 43.  Perhaps nowhere is the significance of spatial expansion more movingly expressed than in an outdoor exhibition by Nobuho Nagasawa titled “Toyo Miyatake’s Camera” at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Commissioned by the Community Redevelopment Agency, this homage to Manzanar’s unofficial resident photographer was first installed in 1993. A triple-sized bronze replica of Miyatake’s homemade camera, the exhibition is displayed in Little Tokyo where his studio had been located before evacuation. At night, slides from this “camera” are projected onto a screen hanging in the window of the museum (formerly the Nishi Hongwangi Buddhist Temple), suggesting an open, even continuous, relationship between institution and street. The sites of re-visioning and remembrance are multiple, the exhibition suggests. By projecting Miyatake’s images onto the very space which had been denied to him, the “Camera” exhibition also demonstrates how renewed encounters with the camera and the photographs that it generates in turn remake, rework, and reenvision the stories of dispossession and reclamation. 44. See, for example, Mitchell T. Maki, Harry H. L. Kitano, and S. Megan Bert­ hold, Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), and Bill Hosokawa, JACL in Quest of Justice (New York: Morrow, 1982). 45. Leslie T. Hatamiya, Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and the Passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 2. See also Hatamiya, “Institutions and Interest Groups: Understanding the Passage of the Japanese American Redress Bill,” in When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparation for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 190–200. 46.  Hatamiya, Righting a Wrong, 2. 47.  Hatamiya makes a persuasive argument for the success of the legislative route. See Righting a Wrong. 48. See Chris K. Iijima, “Reparations and the ‘Model Minority’ Ideology of Acquiescence: The Necessity to Refuse the Return to Original Humiliation,” Boston College Law Review 40, no. 1 (December 1999): 385–427. 49. Murray, Historical Memories, 359. 50.  Quoted in Murray, Historical Memories, 374–375. 51. Martin Kasindorf, “Asian Americans: A ‘Model Minority,’” Newsweek, December 6, 1982, 39; David A. Bell, “The Triumph of Asian-Americans: America’s Greatest Success Story,” New Republic, July 15, 1985, 24–31; Beverly McLeod, “The Oriental Express: Asian Americans Are Seen as a ‘Model Minority’ on a Fast Track to Success,” Psychology Today, July 1986, 48–52; and David Brand, “The New Whiz Kids: Why Asian Americans Are Doing So Well, and What It Costs Them,” Time, August 31, 1987, 42. Debates on the model minority became especially heated with the publication of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: Penguin, 2011).

Notes to Chapter 3  173

52.  Hohri v. United States, 586 F. Supp. 769 (D.D.C. 1984). See also William Minoru Hohri, Repairing America: An Account of the Movement for Japanese-American Redress (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1988). 53. Iijima, “Reparations.” 54. Eric K. Yamamoto, “What’s Next: Japanese American Redress and African American Reparations,” in Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States: On Reparations for Slavery, Jim Crow, and Their Legacies, eds. Michael T. Martin and Marilyn Yaquinto (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 422. 55. Ibid., 420. 56.  Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge, 2001), 41. 57. Ibid., 31–32. chapter 3

1.  Denise Chong, The Girl in the Picture: The Kim Phuc Story (Toronto: Penguin Books, 2000). 2.  Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge, 2001). 3. Sylvia Chong, The Oriental Obscene: Violence and the Asian Male Body in American Moving Images in the Vietnam Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 4. Moreover, the napalm canisters were dropped by a South Vietnamese pilot. 5. Nicholas Tavuchis, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). 6. Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: Norton, 2000). 7. Ibid., xx. 8.  Girma Negash, Apologia Politica: States and Their Apologies by Proxy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). 9. Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 191–212. 10.  Tavuchis, Mea Culpa, 44. 11. Nancy K. Miller, “The Girl in the Photograph: The Vietnam War and the Making of National Memory,” JAC 24, no. 2 (2004): 261–290. 12. See Keith Beattie, The Scar That Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 13. See especially Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 14. See N. Miller, “The Girl in the Photograph”; and Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 15. See Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 16. Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1967).

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17.  While common atomic bomb–related afflictions ranged from radiation sickness to leukemia, among the most prevalent and challenging wounds were the disfiguring and disabling special scars called keloids. Though a scar is defined as a mark left on the skin as a result of the healing of damaged tissue, keloids pose special complications. Described by Hippocrates, the term is thought to derive from the Greek word for “crab claws,” connoting the jagged pattern of deformity on the afflicted. Unlike normal scars, then, keloids are raised and, with their characteristically distinctive coloration, unsightly. Studies suggest that the incidence of abnormal scarring depends on factors such as severity of injury, adequacy of early treatment, incidence of infections, and delays in healing due to malnutrition. That these conditions were rife in postwar Japan helps explain the pervasiveness of this scarring, which, according to some estimates, affected 80 percent of survivors. Keloids posed a particular problem for the hibakusha because, as “cumulative masses of scar tissue that may progressively extend beyond the site of the original trauma,” in binding joints at awkward angles, they often restricted movement of arms, legs, and necks. Well-meaning but inexpert Japanese doctors relied on still-experimental techniques outlined in textbooks or incompletely described in popular magazines. To be fair, the tenacity of keloids made treatment through plastic surgery, a medical specialization still in its infancy at this time, tricky at best; removal offered only temporary relief, as excision often resulted in the emergence of an even larger keloid. See June K. Robinson, Kenneth A. Arndt, Philip E. LeBoit, and Bruce U. Wintroub, eds. Atlas of Cutaneous Surgery (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1996). 18.  These objections are exhaustively recorded in Lifton, Death in Life. 19.  Quoted in Susan M. Lindee, Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 125. 20.  Three explanations stand out as particularly creative: American doctors were disqualified from providing treatment, as they would need to be certified within Japan; diagnosis was itself an important part of treatment; and keloids, as skin conditions to which a body is genetically predisposed, are not an effect of radiation and therefore, as they were beyond the ABCC’s research scope, did not merit treatment. See Lindee, Suffering Made Real. 21. Ibid. 22.  For excerpts of editorials written in support of the Hiroshima Maidens project, see Norman Cousins, Present Tense: An American Editor’s Odyssey (New York: McGrawHill, 1967). Cousins had already confirmed his commitment to philanthropy through an earlier undertaking, “the moral adoptions project,” which provided aid to Japanese war orphans thanks to the generous support of his magazine’s readers. In its focus on girls on the cusp of womanhood, the Hiroshima Maidens project seemed the logical extension of this earlier concern with children: embraced as “daughters” by volunteer mommies and daddies, the project’s participants were construed as symbolic children. 23.  The first intimate, humanizing portrayal of the A-bomb’s aftermath, Hiroshima was published in full in a 1948 special issue of The New Yorker and was an immediate bestseller when it subsequently appeared as a book. An account of Tanimoto’s experiences appears in this book. 24.  Caroline Chung Simpson provides an interesting analysis of the pivotal though overlooked roles played by Japanese Americans in the maidens’ journey to the United States. See Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

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25.  Quoted in Rodney Barker, The Hiroshima Maidens: A Story of Courage, Compassion, and Survival (New York: Viking Press, 1985), 73. 26.  The significance of the Cold War in constructing Asian American constituencies has been extensively explored by a number of important critical studies. See Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and S. Chong, The Oriental Obscene. 27.  Quoted in David Harley Serlin, Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 83. 28.  A comprehensive history of the antinuclear movement’s achievements and failures that also takes into account the influence of the Hiroshima Maidens project is detailed in Lawrence S. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–1970 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 29.  John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946; New York: Knopf, 1988), 20. 30. Serlin, Replaceable You. 31.  Gloria Kalischer and Peter Kalischer, “Love Helped to Heal the ‘Devil’s Claw Marks,’” Collier’s, October 26, 1956, 48–49. 32. Rodney Barker recounts that one of the project’s participants suffered such disfiguration to her face that her own father hid all mirrors in the house. Only after chancing on the sight of her distorted features reflected on the shiny surface of a spoon did she comprehend why others shunned her presence. Similarly, all looking glasses were removed from another maiden’s house, and instead she glimpsed her ravaged face in the still waters of a nearby pond, an inversion of the mirror phase in which the reflection confirms, rather than illusorily consolidates, the fractured body. See R. Barker, Hiroshima Maidens. 33. See John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 34.  While transnational adoption would subsequently be taken in earnest, exploration of this important issue is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this chapter. Analyses of transnational adoption can be found in David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and J. Kim, Ends of Empire. 35. Even Cousins’s affection for his favorite maiden, Shigeko Niimoto, culminated in a lifetime moral and, at times, financial support of her; yet while it involved sponsorship of her return to New York after the project’s end, she was never formally adopted. The most detailed account of Shigeko Niimoto’s story is found in R. Barker, Hiroshima Maidens. 36. See Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas, “Biological Citizenship,” in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, eds. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (London: Blackwell, 2005), 441. 37.  Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 38.  Jane Cochran, “A-Scarred Japanese Women Reach U.S.,” New York Star-Ledger, May 9, 1955. 39.  Theo Wilson, “Hiroshima Maids Here for Aid,” New York Daily News, May 10, 1955.

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40. Ibid. 41.  Cochran, “A-Scarred Japanese Women Reach U.S.” 42. Serlin, Replaceable You. 43.  Wilson, “Hiroshima Maids.” 44. See Serlin, Replaceable You; and R. Barker, Hiroshima Maidens. 45. My thanks to Pauline Wakeham for this observation. 46.  This transcription is quoted in Serlin, Replaceable You. 47. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1962). 48. R. Barker, Hiroshima Maidens. 49. I received this information from John Couch, executive director of Ralph Edwards Productions, via e-mail correspondence, August 6, 2009. 50. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” in The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 130–155. 51. Ibid., 141. 52.  Anne Chisholm, Faces of Hiroshima: A Report (London: Cape, 1985). Given the ideological burden associated with the term Hiroshima Maidens, its invocation throughout this chapter is, admittedly, problematic. And yet this invocation is also necessary for critical reflection on the consequences of its conventional usage and interrogation of the implications of this gendered ideology. For this reason, in this chapter I refer to the group of women as maidens, with the understanding of the controversy that this term invokes. If keloids were disabling for hibakusha generally (a Japanese surgeon, who later accompanied the maidens to the United States, estimates that an astonishing 80 percent of survivors developed keloids, suggesting that radiation exposure might be an exacerbating factor), the project’s emphasis on the maidens’ plight suggests that keloids posed a special challenge for women. Besides singling them out from their unblemished friends, keloids were a source of ongoing and relatively unrelieved pain. Unwelcome reminders of the atomic bomb’s frightening signature that could be transferred onto future generations, it was widely believed that the scars rendered them unfit for “femininity”: because they were considered unattractive, matchmakers were loath to find them marriage partners; because they were perhaps disease prone, it was thought best that they remain childless. See also Tomin Harada, Hiroshima Surgeon (Newton, KS: Faith and Life Press, 1983). 53.  The implicit juxtaposition of a whole, consumerist femininity and its damaged counterpart, in turn, suggests a link between philanthropic project and commercial enterprise as it traded in on the allure of female bodies and their quest for self-improvement, a message that the show’s announcer affirms when he claims, “I’m sure many of you will be eager to help them regain the beauty that they may have lost” (“This Is Your Life: Kiyoshi Tanimoto,” This Is Your Life, NBC, May 11, 1955). 54.  Despite plastic surgery’s primacy—it was, after all, the reason for the maidens’ arduous journey and often painful turn in the spotlight—many associated with the project insisted from the beginning on maintaining realistic (which is to say, moderate) expectations. During their return journey, for example, an observer at an airport remarked that it was unfortunate that nothing could be done for the women, although they were traveling after numerous painful operations. In many cases, the scars could not actually be healed, as previous failed procedures left little skin that was suitable for grafting. 55. R. Barker, Hiroshima Maidens, 91.

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56.  The features of this femininity were by no means universal, but rather must be understood within the specific context of U.S. postwar prosperity. One can discern here a further connotation of treatment: its materialistic dimensions. Notably, many host families treated the maidens to gifts symbolic of American prosperity, lavishing on their charges such commodities as saddle shoes and cashmere sweaters, as well as haircuts and makeup. The maidens appeared to be rehabilitated women, which is to say recovered because they were more womanly. Although a follow-up story in Collier’s magazine announces that “Love helped to heal the ‘Devil’s Claw Marks,’” concealing powders and fashionable clothing that were fully aligned with a typically feminine accelerated consumption played a huge role in the process of healing as well. Their harsh reception within Japan can partially be attributed to the Americanizing scope of the project’s emphatic femininity, which was especially perceptible in the atmosphere of material deprivation within Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 57.  Arthur Joseph Barsky, Sidney Kahn, and Bernard E. Simon, eds., Principles and Practice of Plastic Surgery, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 58.  On the role of photography in representing pathology, see Sander L. Gilman, ed., The Face of Madness: Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1976); Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); and Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 59. See Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (on Documentary Photography),” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 303–342. 60.  Barsky et al., Principles and Practice, 174–185. 61. Ibid., n.p. 62.  Barsky et al., Principles and Practice, n.p. 63.  Though its use was justified as a means of demoralizing the enemy, napalm was even more feared by civilians, because of the horrific scars caused by its fierce flames, which continued to burn beneath skin. Such scars required extensive reconstructive surgeries, procedures that, according to Malvern Lumsden, were “unlikely to be available to ordinary people in most societies in wartime conditions.” In detached prose that belies its underlying censoring perspective, Lumsden notes that compared with single penetrating weapons such as low velocity bullets, napalm must be regarded as an exceptionally cruel weapon. There is also fragmentary evidence that a higher proportion of casualties die from napalm burns compared with projectile injuries, that the advent of death is more prolonged, and that rehabilitation of the survivor is more difficult. If this is so, then napalm may also be regarded as more “effective” from a military point-of-view. Since no comparative study has appeared in the public literature, any judgment as to whether the excessive cruelty can be justified by the claim of military necessity is likely to be subjective. Malvern Lumsden and Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Incendiary Weapons (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975), 155.

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64.  Unlike atomic bombs, which are obviously weapons of mass destruction, napalm is part of an arsenal of conventional warfare. But although incendiary weapons have been used for millennia, napalm itself, like the atomic bomb, was a twentieth-century innovation. A mixture of naphthalene with palmitate, napalm was first developed in 1938, and subsequent experiments sought to perfect the canisters’ flammability— through the efficient ignition of fires that would burn hotter and longer—to ensure widespread devastation in target sites. Used in a limited way in World War II, it was first commonly deployed during the Cold War as it flashed hot in proxy engagements within the Pacific theater, chiefly in Korea and Southeast Asia. See Lumsden, Incendiary Weapons. 65. Visual culture’s political influence, though commonly accepted as a truism of the antiwar movement, has had its share of detractors. For a nuanced analysis of the antiwar movement and atrocity photographs, see S. Chong, The Oriental Obscene. 66.  For a brilliant analysis of the pornographic dimensions of violence and its implications for the naked exposure of Kim Phuc’s body, see S. Chong, The Oriental Obscene. 67. N. Miller, “The Girl in the Photograph.” 68.  Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 176. 69. Ibid. 70.  Harada, Hiroshima Surgeon. 71. Martha Gellhorn’s influential series of articles appeared in the Manchester Guardian and are collected, along with other war writings, in Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War, 3rd ed. (London: Virago, 1986). 72.  Harada, Hiroshima Surgeon, 98. 73. E-mail correspondence, August 15, 2009. 74.  Presently, initiatives have been undertaken to resume the work of the Barsky Unit, though they are being carried out at the National Hospital of Odonto-Stomatology. 75. Emily Barsky, “Medical Missions: A Case Study; The Barsky Unit: A Pediatric Plastic Surgery Unit to Save the Lives of Vietnamese Children During and Following the Vietnam War” (unpublished manuscript). I thank Emily Barsky for her generosity in sharing this unpublished paper with me. 76. E-mail correspondence, August 19, 2009. Besides photographs, fund-raising efforts on behalf of CMRI involved the production of a documentary that humanized the victims who were treated at the Barsky Unit. The ironically named The Gooks, coproduced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and French director Pierre Gaisseau, aired on U.S. networks in 1972. 77. It was to Kretz, whom she called “papa,” that Kim Phuc desperately appealed for help when her pain worsened at a time when money and medical assistance for ongoing complications associated with her injuries were in short supply. In a move that recalls her 1972 rescue by “Uncle” Ut—like “papa,” “uncle” was at once an honorific term of address as well as of endearment reminiscent of the rhetoric of adoption that characterized the maidens’ relationships with their sponsors—Kretz arranged, with the assistance of a highly placed Vietnamese diplomat, for Kim Phuc to receive long-delayed follow-up surgeries. This time, however, she was flown to West Germany for treatment. In the early 1980s, when rebuilding efforts in the SRV were still at an early stage, it appeared that little aid was available for her within Vietnam—the Barsky Unit had closed years earlier—and medical philanthropy approximated more closely the transpacific route that the Hiroshima Maidens project had first mapped.

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78. S. Chong, The Oriental Obscene, 27. 79. Notably, she was forced to quit school in order to sit for interviews in which she was required to claim that she was a student studying under the auspices of the state. 80.  Kim Phuc, in discussion with the author, August 3, 2009. 81.  For a brilliant analysis of the relationship between the Life photograph and Nick Ut’s earlier photograph of Kim Phuc, see N. Miller, “The Girl in the Photograph.” My own interpretation extends Miller’s concern with healing. 82.  John Loengard, Life Classic Photographs: A Personal Interpretation (Boston: New York Graphic Society Books, 1988). 83.  The tactile dimensions of affect have been a subject of increasing critical attention. See, for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming); and Thy Phu and Elspeth Brown, “Feeling Photography: An Introduction,” in Feeling Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 84. Misrecognition is associated with the punctum. See Olin, “Touching Photographs.” 85.  Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96. 86. Ibid., 26–27. 87. So obscure is this photograph that I have been unable to find it, and Kim Phuc herself was understandably reluctant to discuss it when I asked her about it. 88.  D. Chong, The Girl in the Picture, 5. 89.  Kim Phuc, in discussion with the author, August 3, 2009. 90. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 91. See Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 92.  Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 183. 93. Like Kim Phuc, Le Ly Hayslip has established a foundation committed to peace and reconciliation. See Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 94. In his discussion of the question of corporate culpability within the context of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Bonny Ibhawoh notes that corporate apology remains an underdeveloped topic within debates on apology. Instead, the topic tends to be framed as a matter of business ethics, not as an issue relevant to human rights discourse. See Bonny Ibhawoh, “Rethinking Corporate Apologies: Business and Apartheid Victimization in South Africa,” in The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past, eds. Mark Gibney, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, Jean-Marc Coicaud, and Niklaus Steiner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 271–284. 95.  Peter H. Schuck, Agent Orange on Trial: Mass Toxic Disasters in the Courts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 11. 96. Ibid., 177. 97.  Quoted in Schuck, Agent Orange, 177. 98. Marvin E. Gettleman, Jane Franklin, and Marilyn B. Young, eds., Vietnam and America: A Documented History (New York: Grove Press, 1985). 99. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

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chapter 4

1.  This Executive Order is posted on the website of the Centers for Disease Control. See “Executive Order 13295: Revised List of Quarantinable Communicable Diseases,” Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Centers for Disease Control, Department of Health and Human Services, April 4, 2003, available at http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/ sars/executiveorder040403.htm. 2.  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Revised U.S. Surveillance Case Definition for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Update on SARS Cases— United States and Worldwide, December 2003,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 52 (2003): 1202–1206, available at http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/reprint/291/2/173.pdf. 3.  Powers of isolation authorized by Executive Order 13295 were subsequently invoked in May 2007 to contain the threat posed by a traveler infected with multidrugresistant tuberculosis, and most recently, in response to the pandemic potential of the swine flu (H1N1) virus. See “Division of Global Migration and Quarantine (DGMQ),” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Health and Human Services, May 4, 2009, available at http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dq/qa_influenza_amend ment_to_eo_13295.htm. 4. See Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 5. Since the 1997 handover of Hong Kong, as part of an earlier agreement between colonial power Britain with China, the city-state has been known as HKSAR—the SAR, or Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, which was governed by the principle of one country, two systems. Unwittingly or not, SARS invoked the SAR, a region particularly stricken and, in fact, traced as ground zero for global transmission. See S. H. Lee, Qing-He Nie, Liming Lee, Xin-Dong Luo, and Ya-Fei Zhang, eds., SARS in China and Hong Kong (New York: Nova Science, 2006). 6.  Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 7. See Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli (New York: Zone Books, 2008). 8. Shah, Contagious Divides, 7, 8. 9. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 98–99. 10.  These nuggets of public health wisdom are endorsed by none other than Margaret Atwood, grande dame of Canadian literature. 11. Vincent Lam and Colin Lee, The Flu Pandemic and You: A Canadian Guide (Toronto: Random House, 2006), 160. 12. Ibid., 162. 13. See Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 14. See also Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003); and Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, “Biopower Today,” BioSocieties 1, no. 2 (2006): 195–217. 15. See Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

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16. Ibid. 17.  Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 18. Engin F. Isin, “The Neurotic Citizen,” Citizenship Studies 8, no. 3 (2004): 218. 19. See Benjamin Muller, “(Dis)Qualified Bodies: Securitization, Citizenship, and Identity Management,” Citizenship Studies 8, no. 3 (2004): 279–294. 20. Epidemiologists now agree that the worrying signs of a new disease first appeared in late November 2002, in Guanxi, a city in the southern province of Guangdong in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Migrant laborers working in the so-called wild flavor restaurants, which served exotic animals trapped in, then transported away from, their jungle habitat and slaughtered on site, were afflicted with a deadly respiratory illness that quickly spread throughout the region. Though the disease had then yet to acquire an official name, rumors about its still undetermined cause and most effective treatments flashed just as quickly through countless text messages. Because official reports were slow to emerge (in fact, the Chinese government variously denied, repressed, and minimized the facts and extent of cases), these brief communications were, in the early months of the crisis especially, the sole sources of information, however unreliable. By March 2003, the disease had spread beyond the province of Guangdong, and sites isolated by the World Health Organization (WHO) as hot zones, including Hong Kong, Hanoi, and Toronto, crisscrossed the world, though contact tracing established an unmistakably Asiatic route of contagion. While doctors experimented desperately with a brew of antiviral drugs (methods of treatment varied), widely adopted preventive techniques were relatively consistent. In the early days of the outbreak, the first telling sign that something was amiss was, according to journalist Karl Taro Greenfeld, a run on supplies of vinegar, a folk method for filtering infection. Steamed, the vinegar was thought to purify the air. See Karl Taro Greenfeld, China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century’s First Great Epidemic (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), for an account of the crisis in China by Time foreign correspondents. 21. I have been told that N95 masks were simply unavailable for purchase in Beijing, and in Guangdong gauze masks appeared to be routinely washed and reused. In Hong Kong, allegations about scarce resources led to investigations and inquiries. I thank Chris Lee, who was in Beijing during the outbreak, for this information. 22.  The fatal implications of this issue for the outbreak in Toronto are at the center of “Contract Tracing,” a short story by writer Vincent Lam about Delores, a nurse who contracts the virus after wearing an ill-fitting mask. See Lam’s Giller prize– winning short-story collection, Bloodletting and Other Miraculous Cures: Stories (Toronto: Doubleday, 2006). 23. See Deborah Davis and Helen Siu, eds., SARS: Receptions and Interpretations in Three Chinese Cities (New York: Routledge, 2006). 24.  These home-based, makeshift preventive measures can be seen as precursors to—and, during shortages, substitutes for—the surgical masks that were to become a widely adopted means of prevention and protection during the SARS crisis. Ibid. 25. See Christine M. Boeckl, Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2000). 26.  Jamie Kamph, Masks (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 79. 27.  Used for centuries as a means of protection, however unreliable, the mask’s present function as means also of prevention is of relatively recent origin, introduced only in

182 Notes to Chapter 4

the nineteenth century. Even so, the surgical mask was not worn regularly within the clinic until well the late 1920s, despite advocacy on the part of surgical textbooks of the benefits of adopting aseptic techniques. 28. Medical historian Ann Carmichael hints at the mask’s complexities when she observes that the mask was to SARS what condoms are to AIDS. The analogy is striking because it not only refers to their shared function as barrier technologies but also invokes the controversy attending this function, which flashed again in the case of AIDS in the wake of Pope Benedict’s contention that condoms contribute to, rather than slow, the pandemic’s spread. Patently false, the pope’s claim is all the more charged because it was made on a tour of Africa, whose characterization as the “dark continent,” though widely critiqued, nonetheless recurs in the disease’s “Africanization.” Behind the Vatican’s stance on abstinence as the sole morally sanctioned approach to prevention, whether it be with respect to pandemic or unplanned pregnancies, is a tacit conflation of the explosive issues, disease and population control. Like the condom, which in the narrative of AIDS activism symbolizes the saving of life while portending the end of its enjoyment, the mask connotes paradoxes. The analogy between AIDS and SARS, between condoms and masks, underscores the fraught dimensions of protection and prevention. See Jacalyn Duffin and Arthur Sweetman, eds., SARS in Context: Memory, History, Policy: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at Queen’s University at Kingston, 10–11 February 2004 (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006). 29.  The former, an Irish American cook singled out for quarantine in the early twentieth century, endured a lifetime suspension of civil rights. 30. See S. Harry Ali and Roger Keil, eds., Networked Disease: Emerging Infections in the Global City (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008); and Roger Kleinman and James L. Watson, eds., SARS in China: Prelude to Pandemic? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 31.  Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979). 32. Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness. Vol. 1, The Positive Aspects (1962; New York: Springer, 1992). 33. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (1969; Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1992), 50–51. 34.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 35. Similarly, Giorgio Agamben posits that the “face is the only location of community, the only possible city.” See Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 91. 36. Michael Taussig points out that the resonances of the face—faciality— oscillate between mirror and mask, transparency and opacity, revelation and concealment. Although Levinas’s approach to faciality illuminates the significance of the former, the model of ethics he advocates leaves unanswered, indeed even largely unasked, critical questions raised by the latter. Since for Levinas faciality hinges on the revelatory transparency of the mirror, his parable of ethical engagement does not take up, in other words, the significance of the opacity connoted by the mask. See Michel T. Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Notes to Chapter 4  183

37.  Whereas the representation of AIDS has shifted, as many critics have noted, from emphasis on victim to survivor, lingering on the defiant face (instead of the wasted body) of a person living with AIDS (PLWA), the “face” of SARS refuses such handy characterizations. 38. See Martin S. Pernick, “Contagion and Culture,” special issue, American Literary History 14, no. 4 (2002): 858–865. 39.  Besides functioning as an instrument to ward off physical sickness, the mask itself would seem, then, to signify moral sickness. The mask’s effective pathologization parallels Sander L. Gilman’s discussion of the development of reconstructive surgery, specifically the specialization’s focus on repairing the disfigurements caused by venereal disease, the most common of which was the unpresentable (because it was “faceless”) face frequently belonging to the noseless syphilitic. The disfigurements of this subject were a staple of popular European nineteenth-century representations that focused, in turn, on the mask that was worn to conceal them. Yet as evidence of disease, the mask is commonly construed as itself a disfigurement. Moreover, the syphilitic’s disfigurement, Gilman explains, became collapsed in the popular imaginary with that of the Jew, whose unsatisfactory nose similarly served as sign of pathology in a process that racialized “beauty,” whereby subjects of rhinoplasty submitted to a newly emergent normalizing technique that inextricably blended aesthetic with reconstructive aims. See Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 40. Ed Cohen, A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 41. See Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 42.  Paired together, the biomedical concept of “immunity as defense”—a principle that undergirds the desire for clarity and community in the outbreak narratives theorized by Priscilla Wald—intersects, Cohen argues, war and law. In this complex process, the modern body is for Cohen transformed from the “grotesque” described by Mikhail Bakhtin, and instead is obliged to comport itself as a “proper body, a proprietary body.” Cohen, A Body Worth Defending, 7. 43.  Within the United States and Canada, especially, stigma in response to SARS took on such a markedly racial inflection that the Chinese Canadian National Council (CCNC) was obliged to issue a report detailing the devastating impact of SARS on Toronto’s Chinatown. See Carrianne Leung and Jian Guan, Yellow Peril Revisited: Impact of SARS on the Chinese and Southeast Asian Canadian Communities (Toronto: Chinese Canadian National Council, 2004). 44. See Emma Xiaoqin Fan, SARS: Economic Impacts and Implications (Manila, Philippines: Asian Development Bank, 2003). 45.  Critics have noted an overlap between hygienic vigilance and the securitization of borders in the wake of heightened fears concerning terrorism in a post-9/11 era. See Andrew Lakoff and Stephen J. Collier, eds., Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and Andrew T. Price-Smith, Contagion and Chaos: Disease, Ecology, and National Security in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 46. See, for example, “Coping with SARS,” Online NewsHour, transcript of NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, May 8, 2003, available at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/

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bb/health/jan-june03/sars_05–08.html; and “China’s Inaction on SARS Criticized by Former Diplomat,” CBC News, April 5, 2003, available at http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ story/2003/04/05/sars_China030405.html. 47.  Andrew Kipnis, “‘Face’: An Adaptable Discourse of Social Surfaces,” Positions 3, no. 1 (1995): 119–148. 48.  Arthur H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics (New York: Revell, 1894), 16. 49.  David Palumbo-Liu notes that in the United States, the face is the site on which Asiatic characteristics are thought to be most legible. See David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/ American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 50. Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior (Chicago: Aldine, 1967), 12. 51.  Paul Ekman, “Afterword: A Universality of Emotional Expression? A Personal History of the Dispute,” in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, by Charles Darwin, ed. Paul Ekman (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 363–392. 52. If these “photojournalistic” depictions of love sought to incorporate the mask within daily life-affirming norms, the collection Living with It strives for liberation from the mask’s constraints. Compiled by Marcus Oleniuk, a photographer from Toronto now based in Hong Kong, Living with It flaunts a self-conscious awareness of the centrality of the mask in perceptions of the HKSAR as a plague city held worldwide and entrenched within the United States. Though Oleniuk describes himself as a photojournalist, the project is an emphatic critique of the excesses of photojournalism, notably its sensationalizing dehumanization of contagion’s effects. See Marcus Oleniuk, Living with It (Hong Kong: WordAsia Press, 2003). 53.  Consider, for example, the case of Toronto’s contagion response, which focused simultaneously on the health of the city and the vitality of its tourism industry, which had been dealt a crippling blow by the WHO’s travel advisory. Politicians lobbied successfully to lift the advisory. But although they assured the WHO that contagion had been contained, it had not. Twice, outbreaks flashed after the advisories had lifted, leading the nurses’ union to contend in a lawsuit, recently denied a hearing by the Ontario Supreme Court, that such premature announcements protected the interests of business and tourism rather than public health. See “Ont. Put Tourism ahead of SARS Fight: Suit,” CTV News, April 13, 2005, available at http://montreal.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/ CTVNews/20050413/sars_lawsuit_050413?hub=TorontoHome. 54. Indeed, though the missionaries of previous centuries emphasized the pernicious effects of saving face for political contexts, today the most rigorous study of this practice is undertaken by corporations. If the proliferation of business self-help manuals is any indication, understanding face discourse is crucial for business diplomacy. Following this logic, the two losses, of face and of revenue, are inextricable. 55.  The Sinocization of contagion is compounded by the fact that within many affected Asian cities traced as ground zeroes for the SARS outbreak, masks already are a daily part of life, a public urban uniform. 56. Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 211. 57. Ibid., 10. 58.  While articles in Lancet and posted on the WHO website relied on magnified images from an electron microscope of the coronavirus, a colorful illustration appeared

Notes to Chapter 4  185

in still other publications. See, for example, Kathryn V. Holmes, “SARS-Associated Coronavirus,” New England Journal of Medicine 348, no. 20 (May 2003): 1948–1951, available at http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/348/20/1948. 59. See “Virus: Breathing Easier,” Newsweek, April 7, 2003, available at http://www .newsweek.com/id/58915; and “Solving the Mystery,” Newsweek, April 14, 2003, available at http://www.newsweek.com/id/58988. 60. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 200. 61. See Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 62. See Matthew L. Wald, “Threats and Responses: Airport Security; Learning the Etiquette of Patting Down Passengers,” New York Times, October 1, 2002, 20. 63.  Wayne Arnold, “Military Technology Is Adapted to Fight SARS,” New York Times, May 12, 2003, C1. 64. Lisa Parks, “Points of Departure: The Culture of U.S. Airport Security,” Journal of Visual Culture 6, no. 2 (2007): 185. 65.  Peter Adey, “Facing Airport Security: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Preemptive Securitisation of the Mobile Body,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, no. 2 (2009): 274–295. 66. In his study of the harem, a “colonial phantasm” constructed through the conventions of the postcard, Malek Alloula argues that the veil, a fetishized figure of feminized inaccessibility that marks the limits of colonial knowledge, becomes the focus of often eroticized desires for the discursive penetration that is symbolically actualized by the camera. Vexed by the veil, which is to say the unknowable facelessness of the Algerian woman, the photographer is confronted with the threat of his own dissolution: These veiled women are not only an embarrassing enigma to the photographer but an outright attack upon him. It must be believed that the feminine gaze that filters through the veil is a gaze of a particular kind: concentrated by the tiny orifice for the eye, this womanly gaze is a little like the lens of a camera, like the photographic lens that takes aim at everything. The photographer makes no mistake about it: he knows this gaze well; it resembles his own when it is extended by the dark chamber or the viewfinder. Thrust in the presence of a veiled woman, the photographer feels himself photographed; having himself become an object-to-be-seen, he loses initiative: he is dispossessed of his own gaze. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 14. Postcolonial feminists have offered a more nuanced account of the veil, historicizing its deployment not just in colonial fantasies, but also in the rhetoric of Western feminism and in anticolonial protest. See especially Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review 30, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 61–88. 67.  For an analysis of the ways feminism has been coopted in the war on terror, see Zillah R. Eisenstein, “Feminisms in the Aftermath of September 11th,” Social Text 20, no. 3 (2002): 79–99. 68. See Katherine Shaver, “Hair Uncovered, Apology Sought; BWI Screening Prompts Complaint from Muslim Teenager in VA,” Washington Post, January 9, 2002.

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69.  Kaukab v. Harris, N.D. III, Aug. 6, 2003. For a detailed analysis of the legal implications of airport security on civil liberties, see Rohen Peterson, “The Emperor’s New Scanner: Muslim Women at the Intersection of the First Amendment and FullBody Scanners,” Hasting Women’s Law Journal 22, no. 2 (2010): 339–360. 70. See Louise Cainkar and Sunaina Maira, “Targeting Arab/Muslim/South Asian Americans: Criminalization and Cultural Citizenship,” Amerasia Journal 31, no. 3 (2005): 1–27. For more on the possibility of interethnic alliances, see Nadine C. Naber, “So Our History Doesn’t Become Your Future: The Local and Global Politics of Coalition Building Post September 11th,” Journal of Asian American Studies 5, no. 3 (2002): 217–242. 71.  While such allegations about Toronto officials’ dubious motivations are not as harsh as those launched against the PRC’s actions—and the former, premature announcements of containment, is not nearly as nefarious as the bald-faced duplicity evident in China—they are, to some extent, surely in the same vein. Yet despite the concerns shared by Toronto politicians and PRC officials with the economic toll of public stigma, face discourse characterizes the latter context while remaining conspicuously absent in the former. Whereas the Chinese in Toronto were stigmatized, the city’s ostensibly preferential treatment by the WHO would seem to suggest that it was perceived differently than other hot zones. Singapore, for example, similarly sought to lift the WHO travel advisory, but lobbying efforts there were futile. In contrast to such sites, Toronto did not appear as “Asian,” instead seeming to figure as an anomaly along an otherwise unbroken Asiatic route of transmission. See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). 72.  Unfortunately, I cannot reproduce the image here because my efforts to contact Wuhan Evening News to acquire permission to do so have been unsuccessful. The photograph can be viewed on the World Press Photo website at http://www.archive .worldpressphoto.org/search/layout/result/indeling/detailwpp/form/wpp/start/43/q/ ishoofdafbeelding/true/trefwoord/year/2003. 73. See “Photographer Accused of Staging SARS-Period Wedding Shot,” China Daily, April 14, 2004, available at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/200404/14/content_323257.htm. 74. Nonetheless, wedding photography is a genre that remains undertheorized by scholars, with the exception of Bonnie Adrian. See Bonnie Adrian, Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 75.  The first wracking cough in China, to paraphrase political scientist David Fidler, could quickly be heard around the world. See David P. Fidler, SARS, Governance, and the Globalization of Disease (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 76. See Jesse Washington, “Immigration Foes Use Swine Flu to Renew Arguments That Mexican Border Should Be Sealed,” Gaea Times, May 2, 2009, available at http:// news.gaeatimes.com/immigration-foes-use-swine-flu-to-renew-arguments-that-mexi can-border-should-be-sealed-49324/. 77.  Quoted in Hilary Hylton, “Calls to Shut U.S.-Mexico Border Grow in Flu Scare,” Time, April 29, 2009, available at http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/ 0,8599,1894775,00.html.

Notes to the Postscript  187

78. Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 79.  Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). postscript

1.  Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” Angelaki 5, no. 3 (2000): 3–16. 2. Sucheng Chan, Survivors: Cambodian Refugees in the United States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 64. 3. See Yen Le Espiritu, “The-We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose-Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon,” American Quarterly 58, no. 2 (June 2006): 329–352. 4.  A summary of the IIRIRA’s provisions is provided in “The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996,” Migration World Magazine 24, no. 1 (1997): 42–46. 5. See Sentenced Home, dir. David Grabias and Nicole Newnham, Sentenced Home Productions, 2006. DVD, 76 min. 6.  Bill Ong Hing provides the most extensive discussion of the legal implications of the 2002 repatriation agreement between the United States and Cambodia. See Bill Ong Hing, “Deporting Cambodian Refugees: Justice Denied?” Crime and Delinquency 51, no. 2 (April 2005): 265–290. 7. Erika Lee provides an illuminating analysis of the ways that immigration law has historically performed a gatekeeping function. See Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 8. See Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 9. See Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 10.  Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; San Diego: Harcourt, 1994), 296. 11. Ibid., 286. 12. Ibid., 296. 13. Ibid., 295–296. 14.  For more on the origins of human rights discourse and the emergence of the refugee subject as a function of a state of emergency, see Peter Nyers, Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency (New York: Routledge, 2006). 15.  Jonathan Finn, Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), x. 16. Ibid., 2. 17.  The notorious S-21 photographs can be viewed at http://www.tuolsleng.com. 18. Sopheap Theam, e-mail correspondence, May 20, 2011. 19.  “Cambodian Repatriation Survival Guide,” Returnee Integration Support Center, accessed May 23, 2010, available at http://www.risccambodia.org/survivalguide/.

188 Notes to the Postscript

20.  This illustration appeared on the now defunct website of the Returnee Integration Support Program (RISP). After this organization lost its USAID support, it restructured as the Returnee Integration Support Center (RISC). The website for this revamped group features far fewer images and is unusually text-heavy. The sampeah does not appear on this new site, and the old site has been, unfortunately, taken down. The most recent version of the organization’s website, as of this writing, can be viewed at http://risccambodia.org.

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Index

Abel, Elizabeth, 12, 162n38, 162–163n39, 163n41 A-bomb Victims Medical Care Law, 89 Abu Ghraib, 3 Adams, Ansel, 22, 56, 73, 105; Born Free and Equal, 60–67 Adams, Eddie, 105 Adey, Peter, 135 adoption, 100, 175n35; as moral project, 174n22; rhetoric of, 92, 99, 111, 178n77; transnational, 175n34 After the Clouds Lifted, 96 Agamben, Giorgio, 19, 24, 93, 144 Agent Orange, 117–119 Albers, Clem, 22, 54, 59 Alinder, Jasmine, 22, 56, 64 Althusser, Louis, 150–151 A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the United States Constitution (NMAH), 75 Anderson, Warwick, 122 Angel Island, 50, 122 apology, 23, 24, 80–88, 90–91, 96, 108, 117, 136; age of, 85, 195; ecology of, 82–83; and forgiveness, 82, 84, 86, 97, 112, 115; speech act of, 96. See also Derrida, Jacques Arendt, Hannah, 151–52 atomic bomb, 23, 174, 178 Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), 89, 90, 104, 174n20 Azoulay, Ariella, 16, 18–19, 122 bachelor, 29, 34–39

bad subject, 24, 148, 150–151, 157 Balibar, Étienne, 11 bare life, 20, 87, 93, 111, 134, 144, 153. See also Agamben, Giorgio Barkan, Elazar, 85 Barker, Rodney, 96, 100, 175n32 barrier technology, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132, 143, 182n28 Barsky, Arthur, 90, 101–103, 107; Barsky Unit, 108–109, 118 Barthes, Roland: carnal medium, 18; punctum, 114, 179n84 Bascara, Victor, 9 Beattie, Keith, 87 Beauty behind Barbed Wire (Eaton), 75–78 “before and after” framing, 37, 38, 101, 103, 104, 112 Bennett, Jill, 18 Berlant, Lauren, 116 Bhabha, Homi, 11, 16; “sly civility,” 11 bin Laden, Osama, 2–4 biological citizenship, 19–20, 87, 93, 124, 143, 144 biopolitics, 15, 28, 87, 124, 125, 130, 134–136, 143, 153 Black Power, 13 blood libel, 1, 5, 159n3 Brooks, Peter, 138 Browne, Malcolm, 105 Brown v. Board of Education, 14 Bryson, Norman, 71 Butler, Judith, 4

206 Index Cameron, Donaldina, 21, 28, 35–39, 166n26 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 63 Center for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Cho Ray Hospital, 108 Chafe, William Henry, 12 Chan, Sucheng, 148 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 116 Children’s Medical Relief International (CMRI), 108–109, 178n76 Chin, Frank, 9 Cho, Lily, 26 Chong, Denise, 111–114 Chong, Sylvia, 111 Cho Ray Hospital, 108 civil contract of photography, 16, 18, 19 Civil Liberties Act (1988), 80 Civil Rights Act, 14 civil rights movement, 12–15, 80–81 civis, 5 Clinton, Hillary, 3 Cohen, Ed, 130 Cold War, 9, 12, 20, 81, 87, 91, 119, 149, 150, 175n26, 178n64 Coleman, Daniel, 11 Conrat, Maisie and Richard, 75 contagion, 121–125, 128, 130, 134–138, 141– 144 costume, 37, 38, 41 courtesy, 11, 123 Cousins, Norman, 90–94 Creef, Elena Tajima, 22, 58 criminal, 24, 143, 147, 148, 150–156. See also bad subject; mug shot cultivation: and agricultural projects, 22, 59; and culture, 56; discourse of, 14–15, 22–23, 54–60, 62, 66, 70, 73–76, 78, 80–83 Daguerre, Louis, 16 Danovitch, Sylvia, 56–57 Darwin, Charles, and The Expression of Emotions in Humans and Animals, 129, 132 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 19 Deleuze, Gilles, 129 Derrida, Jacques: on apology and forgiveness, 82, 115; on hospitality vs. “hostipitality,” 148, 151 De Young Museum, 75 disfigurement. See scar diva 116  citizen,  Ðô i mó i, 120 Dudziak, Mary, 9 Edwards, Ralph, 94–98 Ekman, Paul, 132, 135

Elias, Norbert, 11, 123, 133–134 encounters, 16–21, 24, 31, 39, 41, 87, 102, 114– 115, 172n43 Eng, David, 16, 160n3 Espiritu, Yen Le, 8, 149 Esposito, Roberto, 130 etiquette, 12, 86, 100, 129; at the airport, 134– 135; as civility, 12, 123; as comportment, 47, 86, 93, 100, 122; ethics of, 129; of hygiene, 15, 20–24, 47, 122–123, 127, 131, 133, 135, 144– 145, 162n38; of introduction, 93; of sneezing, 123, 130 exclusion: denial of rights, 9–10; graphic metaphor for, 6–7, 17, 22, 38, 42, 44, 160n3, 161n8, 164n56; Immigration Act (1924), 28; and laws, 27–28, 35, 47, 140, 148; Page Law, 16, 163n49 Executive Order 9066, 22, 57–58, 75, 78–79 Executive Order 13295, 23, 121–122 exposure, 2, 44, 91, 97, 106, 109, 111, 117 face, 2, 3, 142, 175n32, 182n36; and ethics, 24, 129; face-work, 132, 137; Facial Action Coding System (FACS), 135; masked, 124–125, 127, 129, 130, 183n39; saving face, 46, 48, 124, 131–134, 141, 144, 182n36, 184n54; as veil, 125, 132, 136, 185n66 family portraiture, 21, 27–29, 34–35, 44–47 Farm Security Administration (FSA), 58 femininity, 52, 95, 99–101, 105–106, 115, 176nn52–53, 177n56 Finn, Jonathan, 19, 152, 153 flaneur, 36 flesh, 97 flu pandemic, 24, 124, 141–146 The Flu Pandemic and You (Lee and Lam), 123 Fong Get Photo Studio, 41 foot binding, 42, 44, 46 Foucault, Michel, 11, 41, 135, 163 French Revolution, 16, 24, 93, 143 Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon), 89 Gellhorn, Martha, 107–108 Genthe, Arnold: As I Remember, 29; Dressed for the Feast, 35–36; Fleeing from the Camera, 39; Friends (also Tea Rose), 36–37; Old Chinatown, 21, 29, 34; Self-Portrait with Camera in China­ town, 31, 33; Their First Photograph, 29–30; An Unsuspecting Victim, 31, 32, 34 Gentlemen’s Agreement (1908–1920), 28–29, 46– 47, 52–53 Goffman, Erving, 132 Go for Broke exhibition, 75 Goldberg, David Theo, 11

Index  207 Guattari, Felix, 129 Gunning, Tom, 39, 167n32 Hamann, Trent H., 14 Hampton Institute, 37 “Handbook for Americans” (Life), 8 handshake, 6–7, 12, 14, 17, 21, 47, 97, 99, 114, 129, 145, 156–157, 160n5, 163n41 haptic, 16–18, 164n51. See also touch Harada, Tomin, 107–108 Hardt, Michael, 119 Hariman, Robert, 106, 116 Hart-Celler Act (1965), 148 Herbst, Susan, 11 Hersey, John, 91 hibakusha, 88–91, 99, 104, 107, 174n17 Hirabayashi, Gordon, 79, 81 Hirabayashi, Lane Ryo, 70 Hirata, Lucie Cheng, 35 Hiroshima, 88–91, 94–96, 99, 102, 105 Hiroshima (Hersey), 91 Hiroshima Maidens project, 23, 86–87, 90–93, 99, 102–109, 116, 174n22, 178n77 Hiroshima—Ten Years Later, 94 Hitzig, William, 90 Hobbes, Thomas, 130 Hohri, William, 81 hospitality, 148, 151, 156 H.R. 442, 79 human rights, 81, 93, 152, 179n94 Iijima, Chris, 81 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), 149–150 Immigration Act (1924), 28 immunity, 130, 183n42 “impolitics,” 14 indexicality, 70, 72, 92 instrumental images, 16, 19, 28, 50, 53, 163n47, 166n20 intertwining, 12–14, 97, 114, 163n41 intimacy, 27–29, 50, 116, 133–134, 137–138, 140, 142, 144–145. See also Lowe, Lisa; Shah, Nayan Isen, Engin, 124 Iwasaki, Hikaru “Carl,” 22, 64–65, 70–71 Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), 79–82 Ka Chau, 40 Kahn, Sidney, 101 Kant, Immanuel, 148 Kaukab v. Harris, 136 keloid, 89, 98–99, 174n17, 174n20, 176n52

Keloid Girls, 99 Kim, Claire Jean, 8 Kim, Elaine, 40 Kim Phuc, 23, 84–87, 105–107, 109–116, 118, 119, 178n77 Kipnis, Andrew, 131 Kochiyama, Mary and Bill, 90 Korematsu, Fred, 79 Kraut, Alan, 122 Kretz, Perry, 109–113, 178n77 Kubo, Yone, 22, 70 Ladies’ Agreement, 50 Lam, Vincent, 123 landscape, 21–23, 55–57, 60–64, 67–71, 76, 78, 80, 82, 83, 170n9. See also Adams, Ansel Lange, Dorothea, 22, 56, 59–60, 63, 65, 68 Lee, Anthony, 39 Lee, Kem, 46 Lee, Robert G., 9 Levinas, Emmanuel, 7, 24, 129–130, 182n36 Lewis, Robert, 95–98, 115 Light of Cambodian Children, Inc., 153–154 likeness and liking, 22, 26–29, 46–53. See also intimacy Lindee, Susan, 89 Lowe, Lisa, 11, 19, 27, 85 Lucaites, John Louis, 116 Luibhéid, Eithne, 26, 51 Lum, Wing Tek, 44 Lye, Colleen, 9–10 Ma, Kim Ho, 147, 148, 150 Manzanar, 22, 54, 59–62, 65, 67 Mark, Gregory Yee, 44 masculinity, 34, 98–99, 106, 115 mask: beaked, 127; as boundary technology, 23–24, 130, 136–144; and condom, 182; and disfigurement, 24, 131–133, 137, 141, 142, 183n39; and faciality, 124–126, 130, 182n36; “hygienic mask,” 134; “Miss Mask,” 137; N95 mask, 125, 181n21; and plague, 127; surgical mask, 123, 127–128, 134, 143, 181–182n27; veil (hijab), 125, 132, 136, 185n66 Mbembe, Achille, 11 McNally, Joe, 112–114 melodrama, 87, 138, 140, 144 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 7, 12, 97, 163n41; “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” 12, 163n41 Miller, Angela, 58 Miller, Nancy K., 106 Miller, Tom, 108–109 Miyatake, Toyo, 22, 56, 66–70, 172n43; Artifacts from Three Centers, 76–78

208 Index model minority, 8–15, 25, 54, 80–81, 150, 161n13. See also Nguyen, Viet Thanh More Than a Number exhibition, 24, 153–154 mug shot, 24, 147, 152–156 Muller, Benjamin, 125 Murray, Alice Yang, 80 napalm, 84, 86, 105–108, 110, 177n63 National Council for Japanese American Redress (NCJAR), 81 National Institute for Civility Discourse, 2, 4 National Museum of American History (NMAH), 75 Negash, Girma, 85 Negri, Antonio, 119 Ng, Fae Myenne, 29–30 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 24, 150–151 Nixon, Richard, 118 Okimoto, Daniel, 10–11, 15 On Char, 21, 28, 44–46, 168n49 Ong, Aihwa, 124 optic, 16–18, 164n51 outbreak narrative, 124, 128, 133, 135, 141– 142 Page Law, 16, 163n49 passport, 24, 26–27, 44, 92–94 Palmquist, Peter, 40 panethnicity, 8 Paris Peace Accords, 118 Parks, Lisa, 135 Pascoe, Peggy, 36 Passin, Herbert, 89 Pegler-Gordon, Anna, 6, 16, 26, 28, 42, 160n3 Pernick, Martin S., 130 Petersen, William, 9, 14, 54, 80 Petryna, Adriana, 124, 143 Phan Thi Kim Phuc, 23, 84–87, 105–107, 109– 116, 118, 119, 178n77 Pictorialism, 28, 31, 39, 41–42, 53, 61, 166n20 picture bride, 21, 22, 29, 47–53 plastic surgery, 101–108, 176n54 Plessy v. Ferguson, 40 Plummer, John, 84, 86, 115 polis, 5 Principles and Practice of Plastic Surgery (Barsky, Kahn, and Simon), 101–104, 107 proxy marriage, 29, 47–51 punctum, 114, 179n84 racial triangulation, 8 racist love, 9 recoil, 96, 115

reconciliation, 23, 75, 82–88, 91, 94, 96, 97, 105, 114–116, 119 reconstruction, 102, 118 redress, 15, 23, 57, 78–83, 88, 118; National Council for Japanese American Redress (NCJAR), 81; and Personal Justice Denied, 79; and reform, 37–39 refugees, 19, 24, 148, 149, 151–153, 156; ID photos of, 147, 153–154; subjectivity of, 19 (see also Agamben, Giorgio); United Nations Conventions Relating to the Status of Refugees, 152; United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), 153 rehabilitation, 97, 99, 114, 155–156, 177n56, 177n63 repair, 82, 87, 91–92, 98, 101–106, 112, 116, 119 reparation, 79, 81, 86, 88, 104–105, 108, 116– 120 repatriation, 24, 147–150, 154–156 retouching, 31–35, 44–46 Returnee Integration Support Center (RISC, formerly RISP), 155–157 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 58, 75 Roots: An Asian American Reader, 10 Rose, Nikolas, 143–144 Russell, A. J., 7; Chinese at Laying Last Rail UPRR, 17–18; East Shakes Hands with West (also Meeting of the Tracks or The Joining of the Rails), 6–7, 17 S-21, 153 Sako, Michiko, 94 sampeah, 156–157 Sanimura, Hideko, 93, 96 Savage, C. R., 17 Scapp, Ron, 12 scar, 92, 97, 99, 101, 102, 104, 109–115, 119– 120; keloid, 89, 98–99, 174n17, 174n20, 176n52 securitization, 121, 125, 135–136, 142–143, 183n45 Seitz, Brian, 12 Sekula, Allan, 19, 28, 50, 166n20 sentiment, 15, 21, 27, 29, 37, 50, 53, 87, 92, 99, 138, 140, 148 Serlin, David, 91, 94, 96, 104 Severa, Joan, 38 Shah, Nayan, 122 Shew’s Pioneer Gallery, 41, 43, 46 Shklar, Judith, 24 Shukin, Nicole, 133–134 Silberstein, Mervyn, 31 Simon, Bernard, 90, 101 Sino-sign, 24, 133, 141, 144

Index  209 Situation Room photograph, 3 smile, 21, 56–57, 68, 99, 102–104; “Smile, Please Come Back,” 99, 102 social realism, 70–73 Souza, Pete, 3–4 sovereign power, 19–20, 93, 136 split-screen technique, 95, 97 Stellman, L. J., 31 stereograph, 17, 164nn56–57 Sterling, Charles, 71 Stern, 109–111 Stewart, Francis, 56, 64, 68 still life, 70–74 street and studio portraits, 28, 31–41, 44–46 surveillance, 16, 21, 24, 50–54, 56, 58, 121, 124– 125, 135–137, 149, 152, 153, 155, 161n13. See also Foucault, Michel swine flu (H1N1), 24, 124, 141–146 Taber, Isaiah, 31, 41 Tagg, John, 19 Tanaka, Kei, 49, 51, 168n57 Tanimoto, Chisaka, 95 Tanimoto, Kiyoshi, 90–97, 115 Tanimoto, Koko, 96–97 Tape, Mary, 21, 28, 40–42, 46 Tavuchis, Nicholas, 84–85 Tchen, John Kuo Wei, 39–40 territoriality, 93 Thanksgiving, 74–75 thermal scan, 135 This Is Your Life, 94–99; Ralph Edwards Productions, 96 Tomkins, Silvan, 129

Torpey, John, 26 touch, 12, 97, 130, 137, 140–141, 157 touch point, 113–114. See also Joe McNally Trachtenberg, Alan, 7 transpacifism, 86–87, 90, 104, 107–108, 119, 178n77 United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), 153 USAID, 108 Ushioka, Henry, 22, 70–75 Ut, Huyn Cong Nick, 84, 105–106, 109–111 veil, 125, 132, 136, 185n66 Wakeham, Pauline, 13 Wald, Priscilla, 124, 128, 134 War Relocation Authority (WRA), 22, 56–59, 64, 70, 72–75 Wei, William, 13 Weston, Edward, 63 Wexler, Laura, 37 W. F. Song Studio, 41 Williams, Raymond, 56, 144 Yamamoto, Eric K., 81 Yasui, Minoru, 79, 81 Yellow Peril, 9–10, 132–133, 141 yellow power, 14–15, 80 Yokoyama, Helen, 90, 100 Yu, Vincent, 138–139 Zia, Helen, 13 zoonosis, 133–134, 137, 142–143

Thy Phu is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Western University. 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.