Yellowness as Transpacific Technology: Cinematic Regimes of Race between Japan and Brazil

Abstract This article explores the cinematic functioning of yellow malleability—the instability of the yellowness of the yellow body—within the racial regime forged between Japan and Brazil in the first decades of the twentieth century. Yellow malleability was an ontological premise that allowed local elites to envision an anti-Black future in which racial difference would disappear, overcome by whiteness. The article shows how this racial regime was articulated as the entanglement between gender, race, and cinematic animation, in three objects: the notion of cinematic body evoked by Japanese avant-gardist Murayama Tomoyoshi, Kenji Mizoguchi's film Osaka Elegy (Gion no Kyodai, Japan, 1934), and the framing of Asian American stars Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa in the Brazilian film magazine Cinearte.