Staging Enslavement: Subjection, Exertion, and the Gestural Economies of Medieval Japanese Performance 

Thursday, November 29, 2018

12-1:30 PM

List 220

How might dramatic portrayals of slavery help us rethink the relation between subjectivity, labor, and performance? My talk considers such portrayals through close readings of the dramaturgical writings of master Noh actor, playwright, and theorist Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443), and the play Jinen Koji (Genuine Preacher Jinen), which Zeami revised. The play’s plot is simple: Filial girl sells herself into slavery to pay for parents’ funeral rites. Daring Buddhist preacher dances to purchase her freedom. But what might these coupled exchanges say about calibrated gestures’ capacity to reshape how human life was valued within medieval Japan? What types of physical exertions, gendered relations, economic investments, and affective transactions does the spectacular figure of the slave mobilize—and toward ends? I argue that Zeami deploys an aesthetic of gestural economy to rewrite histories of dispossession, proposing alternatives to performers’ enduring debasement as inhuman.

Reginald Jackson is Assistant Professor of premodern Japanese literature and performance at the University of Michigan. His research interests include premodern Japanese visual culture, Noh dance-drama, queer studies, translation, and contemporary choreography. He is the author of Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls (University of Michigan Press, 2018), and A Proximate Remove: Queering Intimacy and Loss in the Tale of Genji (under review). His research appears or is forthcoming in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Asian Theatre Journal, boundary 2, and TDR: The Drama Review. He is a longtime fan of illustration and all things guitar.

Please RSVP by November 26 at noon.