Marginalized Bodies and the Politics of Visibility

Wendy Kozol
American Quarterly, Volume 57, Number 1, March 2005, pp. 237-247 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2005.0009
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| 237 Marginalized Bodies and the Politics of Visibility
Marginalized Bodies and the Politics of
Visibility
Wendy Kozol
Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs. By Cara A.
Finnegan. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003. 260 pages. $36.95
(cloth).
Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Na-
tion, and the Body. By Elena Tajima Creef. New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 2004. 245 pages. $55.00 (cloth). $19.00 (paper).
Pictures of Afghani women taking off their burkhas, a crowd pulling down a
statue of Saddam Hussein, and American soldiers in desert surroundings are
among the notable images compiling the current visual discourse of the U.S.
war against terrorism. What histories lie behind the images we see today,
and the images we dont see, as we watch bombs drop, view the aftermath of
explosions, and listen to the embedded reporters? Recent media deployments
of Orientalist motifs, for instance, call for historical mappings of the founda-
tions for these visual spectacles. In the last decade or so, scholarship on visual
culture has begun to consider in depth the histories of which bodies perform
citizenship and secure the boundaries of the nation.
1
Questions raised in this
research include how have visual cultures contributed to both the privileging
of certain subjects and the disciplinary control of subordinated citizens? More-
over, how have marginalized subjects used visual discourses to resist such con-
trol? Related, what impact do representations of bodies in need of rescue (as
in the example of the Afghani women) have in sustaining or challenging U.S.
imperialist agendas? Equally important, historical analyses of embodied
citizenships must also contend with the traumas that are elided or erased in
visual representations. For instance, which histories are represented and which
occluded in recent visual articulations of the new multicultural military?
2
The two books under review provide important insights into the historical
production of visible citizenship, focusing specifically on the histories of
marginalization, racism, and oppression at moments of social crisis. Although
asking different historical questions, both Cara Finnegan and Elena Tajima
57.1kozel. 2/18/05, 11:42 AM 237
| 238 American Quarterly
Creef examine the elisions and articulations of alterity that are central to the
production of visual rhetorics of nationhood. As David Morley so aptly ar-
gues, It is not the presence of otherness per se which is problematic but only
that of undomesticated otherness.
3
In exploring marginalized bodies in national visual culture, these two books
also provide methodological perspectives relevant to current developments in
visual culture studies. Finnegans analysis of Farm Security Administration
photographs from the 1930s convincingly argues for a methodological ap-
proach that includes the study of circulation in order to understand both the
specificity and fluidity of meanings in the public sphere (56). Picturing
Poverty challenges historical accounts that assume a monolithic voice in main-
stream debates about poverty in the 1930s by focusing on the production of
multiple visual rhetorics in the popular press. In this way, Finnegan studies
how images operated within a broader scopic field at a key moment in the
emergence of a national American culture.
Studies of the role of visual culture in the production of national identity
have primarily examined mainstream media and have been less attentive to
alternative representational practices. To what extent, we need to ask, have
alternative and oppositional visual practices worked with and against domi-
nant visual rhetorics of citizenship? In Imaging Japanese America, Creef exam-
ines a range of historical visual and literary sources that imaged and imagined
Japanese America. She places mainstream media representations of the Japa-
nese-American body in dialogue with alternative visual practices produced by
Japanese-American artists and writers. Methodologically, then, Creef asks dif-
ferent questions about the public sphere that explore how alternative practices
intervene, disrupt, and/or challenge hegemonic practices.
Picturing Poverty reexamines the now-famous archive of photographs pro-
duced by the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration/Farm
Security Administration (hereafter referred to as the FSA) from 1934 to 1943.
Although numerous scholars over the years have studied this archive,
4
Finnegan
argues that no one has examined the different sites of publication and how
these sites produced multiple discourses on poverty. She employs a rhetorical
analysis that examines specific photographs in their publication sites in order
to pay attention to their fluidity as material traces of history (xii, authors
italics). This methodological concern with circulation enables Finnegan to say
something new in a rather crowded field of study. The book examines three
prominent locations that published FSA photographs in the 1930s: the social
work journal Survey Graphic, the photography annual U.S. Camera, and the
popular biweekly Look. Picturing Poverty focuses on the relationship between
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| 239 Marginalized Bodies and the Politics of Visibility
the photographs, the personnel who produced them, and the editors at these
journals. Through archival evidence, Finnegan demonstrates that Historical
Section photographs did not end up in the magazines naturally or because
of an intrinsic interest in the topic. For instance, the appearance of FSA pho-
tographs in Survey Graphic was the result of a carefully constructed and nur-
tured, mutually beneficial relationship (77) between Roy Stryker, director of
the Historical Section, and Florence Loeb Kellogg, the art director at the jour-
nal.
Detailed analyses of specific photo-essays demonstrate that it matters enor-
mously where and how images appear in print. Finnegans close readings re-
veal a diversity of poverty discourses that range from hostile arguments that
blamed the poor to liberal views that focused on structural causes. Looking
first at Survey Graphic, Finnegan explores how this small-circulation but highly
influential progressive social welfare journal promoted a structural analysis of
poverty and endorsed New Deal solutions. For instance, she analyzes how
pictures of black and white farmers by Arthur Rothstein and Ben Shahn pro-
duced a narrative of structural poverty that featured racial differences and yet
elided the problems of racism. Finnegan notes that the images, both as they
are framed by their captions and as they are composed and cropped, aim to
make the individuals they depict visual synecdoches (87, authors italics).
Synecdochal moves elided the complex intersections of migration, tenancy,
and race relations in the South in support of the social welfare agenda central
to the journal. Finnegan also discusses the by-now iconic photograph by
Dorothea Lange, the Migrant Mother, arguing that photographs like this
one could, at times, disrupt the social science rhetoric of Survey Graphic. As
she notes, Langes photographs leave open the possibility of an alternative
narrative (98) and even interpose an ambivalence toward New Deal solu-
tions. Finnegan positions the Migrant Mother within a larger tradition of
portraiture to show how the image resists the synecdochal by conferring dig-
nity and respect upon those who might not ordinarily receive it: the poorest of
the rural poor (103). Although this argument about portraiture is compel-
ling, I am skeptical of the claim that Migrant Mother provides a
counternarrative to Survey Graphics social science rhetoric, since images of
impoverished yet dignified subjects supported social welfare ideals about the
deserving poor, especially through idealized images of motherhood.
5
In Picturing Poverty, rhetorical analyses explore both the specificity of mean-
ing within a photo-essay and the shifts in meanings as contexts change. In
contrast to Survey Graphic, U. S. Camera, the photography annual that Ed-
ward Steichen helped establish in the 1930s, asked its readers to view the
57.1kozel. 2/18/05, 11:42 AM 239
| 240 American Quarterly
Historical Sections photographs aesthetically, as models of visual virtuosity
(121). Critics of U.S. Camera, at the time and subsequently, charge that the
journal aesthetized poverty in its promotion of photographs as art works
decontextualized from their social contexts. For instance, Finnegan argues that
a photograph by Arthur Rothstein of a pregnant woman and child in a door-
way emphasizes the mothers dignity at the expense of attention to social,
political, or economic issues. Comparing the photograph with the same im-
age on file in the Library of Congress reveals that cropping and high contrast
printing produced a more timeless image of maternal anxiety. Finnegan also
compares U.S. Cameras printing of Langes Migrant Mother with Survey
Graphics to show how the former journal turned it into an even more iconic
image of universal motherhood, strength, and beauty. For all its focus on tech-
nical concerns, however, the journal, under Steichen, struggled between com-
peting agendas. Importantly, Finnegan here goes beyond a critique of
aestheticization to examine the tensions between aesthetics and documentary
impulses in U.S. Camera. The FSA photographs appeared in a separate sec-
tion, a move intended to mark out space for viewers to consider the social
and political aspects of the photographs rather than their aesthetic qualities
(121). Finnegans insightful analysis identifies how competing agendas about
the role of FSA photography operated within a hostile political climate. As she
argues, We must understand further that the dichotomy is itself rhetorically
productive, for it recognizes the realities of the timethat a government pho-
tography project created to publicize efforts to manage poverty could not align
itself with the discourses of art and expect to survive (166).
The 1930s saw the emergence of the popular mass-marketed picture maga-
zines. Curiously, Life, the most popular of these magazines in the late 1930s
and 1940s, did not publish many FSA photographs because, Finnegan argues,
the magazine had its own photographers and was unwilling to cede control
over content to Stryker. Look, in contrast, provided an important outlet for
the Historical Section photographs in the popular press. Finnegan argues that
Look downplayed the news in favor of spectacle by allowing its readers to
venture voyeuristically into the realm of rural povertyjust as they might
peer into the homes of Hollywood celebritiesLook made rural poverty a
fictionalized spectacle, something to LOOK at, but not to engage as a social
or political reality (170). Through layout, cropping, and texts, the magazine
constructed various exotic others, and deployed those same conventions in
ahistorical representations that infantalized the poor as curiosities. Finnegans
analysis of Looks voyeuristic discourse on poverty provides an important cau-
tionary reading against still-popular claims for politically radical possibilities
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| 241 Marginalized Bodies and the Politics of Visibility
of the FSA archive. As she argues, Stryker placed photographs in Look with
less concern for the message presented than for the fact of their circulation.
Picturing Povertys analysis of poverty discourses examines how visual rheto-
rics depended upon the presence and elision of racial bodies. All the journals
published FSA photographs of African Americans in ways that typically elided
the historical specificity of the racism embedded in the tenancy system. In-
stead, Finnegan points out, the white Okie family came to symbolize the
Depression experience of rural Americans, and it continues to dominate our
public memory of the Depression today (26). While this is a crucial point,
Finnegan does not pursue this insight about whiteness any further. In addi-
tion, greater attention to gender would offer a more complex perspective on
the contours of racial citizenship and marginalization at this moment of na-
tional crisis. While noting that white children and mothers figure prominently
in both the FSA archive and in the print culture of the 1930s, Picturing Pov-
erty does not engage with feminist theoretical perspectives on embodiment,
gaze, and spectatorship. How, for instance, were discourses of racialized femi-
ninity and domesticity mobilized to construct an ideal of the deserving poor?
Did that shift from journal to journal or was that consistent across them?
How did this racialized gender ideal shape and limit the visible nation? More-
over, did discourses of poverty mobilize a subordinated masculinity and how,
in turn, did that intersect with racial ideals in depictions of people in breadlines
or picking cotton?
Studying the multiple discourses on poverty in 1930s print culture compli-
cates our understanding of the role of visual culture in producing historical
knowledge about the nation and its problems. As Finnegan writes, If we are
to understand how images become inventional resources in the public sphere,
then we need to abandon a sense of circulation as merely a medium of trans-
fer, a passive conduit of meaning or representation (223). This important
argument, however, assumes, more than it interrogates, the concept of the
public sphere and how visual culture participates in or becomes the site of
public discourse. Moreover, this study of the role of visual culture in pro-
ducing historical memory does not, unfortunately, consider the dominance of
the FSA in American Studies scholarship. Given the attention to circulation
in Picturing Poverty, the author could provide a more self-referential critique
to grapple with the archives subsequent and extensive history.
Questions about the visual rhetorics of nation, citizenship, and embodied
identities also shape Elena Tajima Creef s project in Imaging Japanese America.
While Finnegan examines circulation in print culture, Creef studies visual
culture as a contested public sphere of hegemonic and counterhegemonic prac-
57.1kozel. 2/18/05, 11:42 AM 241
| 242 American Quarterly
tices that produce historical knowledge about Japanese American subjectivities.
Imaging Japanese America explores how the foundational moment of forced
removal and internment of almost 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans
during World War II produced a legacy that has framed subsequent represen-
tations. Creef examines how a framework of enemy aliens, model minorities,
and an idealized notion of white American citizenship (7) scripted Japanese
Americans as outside the visual politics of the nation. Throughout the book,
she counterpoises this analysis with representations by Japanese Americans
whose work negotiates and attempts to reclaim this visual economy. This study
utilizes theoretical perspectives from feminist, race, and ethnic studies to ex-
amine a broad range of materials, including documentary photographs of the
camps, museum exhibitions, Japanese-American poetry, novels, performance
art, and the figure skating star Christi Yamaguchi. Imaging Japanese America is
an important contribution in the growing field of Asian American visual cul-
ture studies because of the consistent dialogue that it produces between hege-
monic discourses and works that seek to disrupt the Western gaze.
6
Creef argues that the painful legacy of internment is the origin story be-
hind second-generation Japanese American self-alienation because it narrows
identity to a choice between the (falsely) dichotomous poles of a Japanese
versus an American identity (14). Government censorship and tight control
over access resulted in a very limited visual archive from the camps. Creef
analyzes photographs produced by sympathetic documentarians in part be-
cause these remain today the most widely circulated and often iconic images
of the internment. Her analysis of the work of Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange,
and Toyo Miyatake (one of the only Japanese-American photographers al-
lowed to photograph the camps) examines how the documentary gaze attempts
to reinscribe the Japanese American face and body with visible signs of Ameri-
can citizenship, loyalty, heroism (18). While differences exist between the
photographers, for all of them the visible politics of citizenship comes at the
expense of representing the traumas of racial oppression for Japanese-Ameri-
can subjects.
In a rare departure from landscape photography, Ansel Adamss photographs
of Manzanar, compiled in Born Free and Equal (1944),
7
produced a visual
record of loyalty intended to denounce this forced incarceration. In his efforts
to produce the loyal citizen, Creef argues, Adams de-Orientalized his subjects
and refashioned them into unambiguously all-American citizen subjects (19).
What started as a powerful counterhegemonic move backfired by stripping
Japanese Americans of the specificity of their cultural and racial identity
(27). Creef argues that these visual images of loyalty erased the memory of
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| 243 Marginalized Bodies and the Politics of Visibility
the physical, constitutional, and psychological violence of the internment ex-
perience (32). Significantly, Miyatakes work functions similarly to Adamss
in that he routinely represented Japanese Americans at Manzanar as highly
industrious, productive, and adaptable model minority subjects of incarcera-
tion (59). Here, Creef disputes historical accounts that describe Miyatake as
the intrepid, clandestine photographer producing an illicit gaze. Instead of
providing a more truthful or authentic view of the camps, she reinterprets the
value of this archive, arguing that Miyatakes photographs normalized the in-
carceration as part of a visual project of reclaiming citizenship.
In contrast to the work of Adams and Miyatake, Dorothea Langes photo-
graphs focus on the incarceration as a tragedy in her attempt to visually refute
wartime claims that the internment was either a patriotic or necessary act.
Lange, who worked briefly for the War Relocation Authority, the civilian gov-
ernment agency that ran the camps, deployed visual strategies similar to those
used in her FSA photographs to rework the face of dignified poverty into the
tortured face of relocation (40). Like Finnegan, Creef is attentive to nuances
of presentation. For instance, her analysis of Langes famous picture of Japa-
nese-American schoolgirls pledging allegiance demonstrates how cropping
articulates one set of politics at the expense of others. One of the girls, who
smiles at the camera and potentially disrupts a message of tragedy, is frequently
cropped out in reproductions. Tragedy, like smiling loyalty, narrowed the rep-
resentation of Japanese-American subjectivity with significant consequences
for historical memory of the incarceration.
Imaging Japanese Americans provides nuanced discussions of the ways in
which race and gender intersect in documentary photographs to produce po-
litical messages about citizenship and loyalty. Creef examines the ways in which
representations of femininity and maternity envision a normalizing subjectiv-
ity. She also provides an insightful critique of masculinity, an issue that has
gone untheorized in most accounts of the camps. Creef s study, like Finnegans
interrogation of Survey Graphic, demonstrates how the politically sympathetic
gaze of the documentary camera, intentionally or not, resecures hegemonic
claims of national identity.
While this is an important critique of the liberal gaze (be it apologetic or
tragic), questions linger for me about why people posed for the camera. Why
did they smile and gaze back? Are there ways to read the agency of Japanese
American subjects in these images? With little to suggest overt coercion, do
we read these images as acts of collusion with state propaganda, or did Japa-
nese Americans self-consciously refuse to be represented as victims at a mo-
ment of intense racial conflicts throughout the nation?
8
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| 244 American Quarterly
While Imaging Japanese America does not interrogate questions of self-rep-
resentation in the wartime documentary photographs, Creef does explores
this question in her fascinating discussion of Mine Okubos autobiographical
art book, Citizen 13660.
9
One of the few critical voices from the camps pub-
lished in the 1940s, the artist positions herself as both an insider and outsider
in her community. Creef s analysis explores how the artist makes visible the
boundaries of the public and private to expose painful aspects of internment
that include the lack of privacy and the subsequent degradation of family life.
Citizen 13660 exposes the contradictions posed by the camps, that of the
citizen and the alien, by visualizing subjects who display a range of emotional
reactions and thus challenge the homogeneity depicted in hegemonic prac-
tices. Moreover, Okubo implicates the readers gaze in a visual act that refuses
a historical distancing from these events. Creef s insightful reading of the au-
tobiography would appear to turn to artists as the alternative to what may
seem to be the limitations of documentary photography as a critical practice.
In this fine book, however, Creef resists such simplistic comparisons. Instead
of dismissing the genre as hopelessly implicated in the hegemonic, along with
her analysis of Citizen 13660, Creef analyzes Gary Okihiro and Joan Myerss
1996 documentary memoir, Whispered Memories. This project rescues the pos-
sibilities of a documentary gaze by showing alternative visual possibilities,
most importantly reminding us that the ruins of the former camps remain
marginalized not only in desolate American landscapes but in our national
memory as well (121).
Questions about national memory shape subsequent discussions about the
appearance and/or disappearance of the camps in later representations of Japa-
nese America. As Creef observes, Hollywood made only five films and one
television movie on the subject in fifty years, and all of them are structured,
not around the painful costs of incarceration but around an embattled white
American masculinity (94). In contrast to Hollywood, Creef examines Japa-
nese-American independent films, especially focusing on those made after the
successful redress movement in 1988. Japanese-American filmmakers often
employ innovative visual and narrative techniques to disrupt official histories
and break the silences. Many of these films engage with issues of physical
dislocation and psychological disruption in the aftermath of internment. Most
consistently, post-redress Japanese-American filmmakers struggle to engage
with the historical erasure and protective silence [that] beget symbolic racial
erasure and a sense of shame (102). Creef s discussion of Rea Tajiris film
History and Memory (1991), for instance, examines the filmmakers study of
memory and silence through juxtapositions of official footage with personal
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and familial experiences. One notable moment in the film occurs when Tajiris
mother, who never appears on camera in the present, speaks about her loss of
memories. History and Memory, as in other films, engages with the impact of
the internment on the postinternment generation in order to exorcise the
ghosts of their own family closets and, by extension, our national closet of
traumatic wartime memory (104).
In contrast to Hollywoods focus on white masculinity, in post-redress
films, the historical trauma of the wartime experience is most powerfully sig-
nified through the figure of the Japanese American female body (100). Inde-
pendent filmmakers have turned to the female body as a productive space to
engage the complex visual politics of this history. Janice Tanaka, for instance,
in Memories from the Department of Amnesia (1991) focuses on her mothers
mental and physical breakdowns to explore a broader narrative about trauma
and alienation. Imaging Japanese America thoughtfully shows how filmmakers
have visualized trauma and memory yet leaves uninterrogated the implica-
tions of focusing so narrowly on the female body. I wonder, for instance, about
some of the costs of mobilizing the female body as the image of victimization.
Imaging Japanese America also pursues the legacy of internment by examin-
ing postwar national memorialization. Creef studies the exhibition at the
Smithsonians American History Museum, A More Perfect Union, an ex-
hibit of an actual barracks at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM),
and the current status of the historical site at Manzanar. Comparing exhibi-
tion spaces with Manzanar offers insights into the possibilities of restructur-
ing national memory and the politics of visibility. For instance, at Manzanar,
one tour guide presents a narrative of this forced removal in dialogue with
other histories of forced removal, specifically the history of indigenous people
in the area. Creef uses this moment to ask broader questions about bearing
witness and the dilemmas of historical authenticity. In acts of witnessing, in-
clusions and exclusions trouble historical memories of subjectivity, oppres-
sion, and resistance. For the Japanese America community, silence continues
to problematize acts of memorializing and witnessing. As Creef notes, Larger
questions about the difficulties inherent in constructing collective national
narratives about disturbing chapters in American history . . . continue to arouse
deep-seated memories of anger, shame, and guilt. That so many who were
eyewitnesses to history still do not want to talk about those years complicates
our desire to render visible and give voice to wartime narratives that have been
buried for over fifty years (140). Imaging Japanese America itself bears wit-
ness, but it does so in ways that remind us of the possibilities and problematics
of visual memory acts.
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| 246 American Quarterly
Creef brings this historical study forward in time, looking at more recent
representations of Japanese Americans to ask how older wartime anxieties of
nationhood, citizenship, and loyalty travel across time (146). Her analysis of
the 1992 Olympics, for instance, examines how the media negotiated xeno-
phobic antipathies toward Japan and national anxieties about multiculturalism
by transforming the figure skating Japanese-American Olympiad Christi
Yamaguchi into the all-American girl. Media coverage of the figure-skating
battle between Midori Ito from Japan and Yamaguchi reproduced historical
narratives of race, citizenship, and nation, providing evidence once again of
how the bodies of Japanese-American women continue to operate as sites of
struggle over nation and citizenship. Contrasts between Itos machine-like
athleticism and Yamaguchis artistry reasserted a modernist narrative pre-
mised on claims of gendered citizenship and the elision of racial identity. Creef s
analysis foreshadowed the 2004 Olympics, in which the complex geopolitical
tensions related to the war on terrorism complicated the race, gender, sexual,
and class politics of visibility. As they did with Yamaguchi, the American me-
dia trotted out visual and rhetorical conventions to link sports to nationalist
projects in order to remap the boundaries of visible citizenship. As predictable
as this may have been, what is less predictable and hence both analytically and
politically compelling, as Creef s work reminds us, is how media coverage of
the Olympics can mobilize, and erase, bodies with histories.
Imaging Japanese America makes an important contribution to American
Studies scholarship through its detailed analysis of the centrality of Japanese-
American visual culture to the production of historical knowledge about the
nation, citizenship, and marginalization. The book, however, presumes too
much historical knowledge by the reader, so that history itself tends to be a
backdrop. Like much of visual culture scholarship, Imaging Japanese America
would benefit from more attention to the dialogic interactions between repre-
sentation and specific historical conditions, structures, and processes out of
which these images emerge. Rather than allowing internment, the Cold War,
or the 1992 Olympics to provide the reference point for a study of the visual
images, more in-depth interrogation of the contexts of production would en-
rich this analysis of the role of the visual in historical practices.
That being said, Imaging Japanese America provides important theoretical
insights into the visual production of Japanese-American subjectivity. Equally
important, Creef offers valuable discussions of the role of historical memory
in the visual mappings of national identities. Creef s methodological perspec-
tive examines a range of practices and listens to multiple and competing voices
to show that extending the boundaries of visual representation to include art-
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ists ranging from poets and performance artists to Web site designers (as she
does in her conclusion) can also teach us something about imagining
multicultural America at the close of the twentieth century (174). At a time
when mainstream media are obsessively reproducing a discourse of visible pa-
triotism, we need to attend, as Creef does, to those artists and writers engag-
ing with marginal subjectivities and national identity. How are they claiming
visible citizenship at this moment when both the media and the Homeland
Security Administration are marking certain bodies, made vulnerable by dif-
ferences in race, gender, or sexuality, as alien and/or terrorist?
Notes
1. See Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1997), for an analysis of contemporary visual national rhetorics. For examples
of recent historical analyses of nineteenth-century visual culture and nationalism, see Steven Hoelschers
recent review, Visualizing Stories of Time and Place, American Quarterly 56.1 (2004): 20121. See
also Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of
U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). For examples of historical
studies of twentieth-century visual culture, see citations in subsequent notes.
2. See Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945
2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), chapter 6, for a discussion of how the military
visually promoted the new multicultural soldier during and after the Gulf War.
3. David Morley, Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity (London: Routledge, 2000), 223.
4. See, e.g., James Curtis, Minds Eye, Minds Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1989); Pete Daniel et al., Official Images: New Deal Photography (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987); Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly Brannan, eds., Documenting America,
l9351943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Melissa McEuen, Seeing America: Women
Photographers between the Wars (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2000); Nicholas Natanson,
The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1992); and Charles Shindo, The Dust Bowl in the American Imagination (Lawrence: University of
Kansas Press, 1997).
5. For other readings of Migrant Mother, see Curtis, Minds Eye, Minds Truth, 126; Wendy Kozol,
Madonnas of the Fields: Photography, Gender, and 1930s Farm Relief, Genders 2 (1988): 126; and
Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (London: Verso, 1994).
6. For recent examples of Asian American visual culture scholarship, see, e.g., Gina Marchetti, Romance
and the Yellow Peril (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Darrell Y. Hamamoto, Monitored
Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1994); Jun Xing, Asian America through the Lens: History, Representations, and Identity (Walnut Creek,
Calif.: AltaMira Press, 1998); Peter Feng, Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); and Laura Hyun-Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/
American Women (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).
7. Ansel Adams, Born Free and Equal: Photographs of the Loyal Japanese-Americans at Manzanar Relocation
Center, Inyo County, California (New York: U.S. Camera, 1944).
8. For my position on these questions, see Kozol, Relocating Citizenship in Photographs of Japanese
Americans During World War II, in Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the Real,
ed. Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 21750.
9. Mine Okubo, Citizen 13660 (New York: Arno Press, 1978 [1946]).
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