ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with a collection of photographs amassed by Chinese American teenager Frank Jue between 1915 and 1919 and assembled into an album sometime in the 1920s. It asks how vernacular practices of looking such as photographically mediated sightseeing help (re)produce the relations through which diasporic subjects constitute themselves as a community. The photographs in Jue’s album reimagine and reclaim space in ways that interrupt white supremacist projects of territorialization, but fail to address the histories of Indigenous expropriation on which even Jue’s reflexive photographic gaze depends. If the album’s challenge to heteronormative Euro-American projects of national reproduction is in the end limited, the author concludes by reflecting on her own desire as a diasporic subject to keep it close nonetheless.
