Xinyi Zhao

Xinyi Zhao is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the Departments of Japanese Studies and Chinese Studies at National University of Singapore. Her research explores the transnational and interdisciplinary dimensions of East Asian cinema, integrating film studies with local and translocal histories, media archaeology, gender and race studies, and postcolonial theory. Her writing has appeared in Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Contemporary Cinema (Dangdai Dianying), Women Film Pioneers Project, and Contemporary Queer Modernism.

Her dissertation, "A National Cinema in Search of a Nation: Media Culture, Spectatorship, and Colonial (After)Lives of Manchuria, 1900s-1940s," presents a media and cultural history of cinema in the then Japanese-occupied region of Manchuria (present-day Northeast China). At the heart of the dissertation are two interlocked processes of “becoming”: (1) the process of transforming Manchuria into Manchukuo, the Japanese Empire’s multi-ethnic client state during the 1930s and 1940s, and (2) the process of creating a national cinema for the radically invented “pseudo-nation." Taking Manchuria’s liminal position as an entry point, the first part of the dissertation examines the construction of local film culture and its role in the transregional knowledge production about race/ethnicity, and nation among Japan, China, and the United States. The middle portion reconsiders cinema as a point of intersection among different modes of viewing informed by the then-emergent media practices such as colonial tourism, open-air exhibitions, and hygiene education. Finally, it closes with a critical reflection on the aporia concerning the film historiography of Manchukuo and its contested legacy in Communist-led postwar China.