Yellowness

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This book studies the visual production of the racial category of yellowness between twentieth-century Japan and Brazil, where the term “yellow” is still widely used to describe people of East Asian descent. Revealing how film and photography were used to define yellowness as a racial abjection destined to disappear, André Keiji Kunigami uncovers an undertheorized Asian–Latin American cinematic regime that articulated an unstable relation among race, gender, and the body—and ultimately ascribed to yellowness the potential to support postslavery Brazil’s aspirations to whiteness. Drawing on media as diverse as Brazilian eugenic photography of the 1930s, midcentury avant-garde cinema, and the commercial erotic genre of pornochanchada, Yellowness offers a bold intervention into the intertwined histories that made Brazil home to both the largest Black population outside Africa and the largest ethnically Japanese population outside Japan.

André Keiji Kunigami is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine.