Breakfast at Kuniyoshi’s: Photography, Forgetting, and Racial Form

This article examines a number of visual and verbal texts that gather around Capote’s 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, including the paintings of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the painter on whom Capote’s I. Y. Yunioshi and Mickey Rooney’s infamous yellowface caricature were based. The article focuses particularly on the way in which photography—both aesthetically and historically—can be read in racial terms, particularly in light of the underappreciated fact that it would have been impossible for a Japanese American to work as a photographer during World War II, when the novella is set. In this context photographs register not only as a highly mediated image of the novella’s heroine, but also as a figuration of racial form. Particularly in Edward’s adaptation, race is transformed into a series of signs that become transferable from one body to another, and as such becomes unmoored from historical grounding. This abstraction in turn authorizes a further redeployment of racial logics in service of the larger midcentury project of justifying an affiliation with a recent enemy as the postwar economic reconstruction of Japan became crucial to U.S. hegemonic ambitions in the Asia-Pacific.