The Flux of Domesticity and the Exotic in a Wartime Melodrama

Nagayama examines actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi's film identity. Her performances not only illustrate the politics of the same or the other in the context of pan-Asianism but also call into question the notion of cultural hybridity. If the construction of gender and ethnicity is simultaneously mediated by spatial procedures, the mixing symbolized by the hybrid should not be understood in cultural terms in a narrow sense but as an always spatial and gendering process. In order to decipher uncategorized contests in colonial encounters, the mapping of bodies is crucial at the multiple levels of locations and spatialities.