Playing the minzu/minzoku card: Melodramas of race and nation in colonial Manchuria

Abstract

Through the lens of minzu/minzoku (‘ethos’, ‘race’, or ‘nation’), this paper examines the melodrama practices of the Manchuria Film Association (Manying), a Japan-financed film production company that aimed to create a ‘national cinema’ for the diverse ethnic populations in the ‘­puppet’ state’ Manchukuo (1932-1945). Beginning with an analysis of contemporaneous discourse on minzu/minzoku, it unravels the cinematic transaction and circulation of ‘racialized feelings’ across Japan, China, and Hollywood and illustrates how knowledge production about race and nation in the three empires overlapped. Next, it traces how Manchurian melodramas deployed pathos and action in stirring and regulating ‘racialized emotions’ and how the minzu/minzoku card was played by Chinese and Japanese filmmakers differently. A cross-cultural and transgeneric mode, it argues, melodramas in Manchuria helped to shape new ways of conceiving nation and race amid the global expansion of colonial modernity.