Performance, Queer and Feminist Theory, and Creative Learning Beyond Japanese Culture: An Interview with Reginald Jackson, Mary Griggs Burke Chair in Asian Studies (2024-2025)
Reginald Jackson is the Mary Griggs Burke Chair in Asian Studies (2024-25) and Professor of premodern Japanese literature and performance at the University of Michigan. His research interests include medieval calligraphy, illustrated handscrolls, Noh dance-drama, contemporary Japanese choreography, African American literature and visual culture, queer studies, and translation. One goal of his scholarship is to reimagine the field of Japanese Studies in generative ways that prove more open to diverse archives, questions, and contributions. Jackson 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 (University of California Press, 2021). Currently he is revising a manuscript on feminist dance entitled Yasuko Yokoshi: Choreography Beyond Japanese Culture. His newest book project examines the relationship between slavery and performance in premodern Japan, drawing from black studies and Japanese studies to read beyond their respective disciplinary blind spots. His writing appears in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, TDR: The Drama Review, Theater Survey, boundary 2, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, and Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. He has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from The Fulbright Foundation, Japan Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the Ford Foundation. His scholarly pursuits are enriched by a devotion to illustration and electric guitar.
AMES PhD student Hunter Mcleod: First of and foremost, I want to thank you for joining us in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies as the 2024–2025 Mary Griggs Burke Chair in Asian Studies. We are so grateful to you for taking a whole year to join our department and share your expertise and research with us. During your stay with us this Fall you are teaching a course titled “Japanese Narrative Design Lab.” The course description says of the course that: “The Japanese Narrative Design Lab blends critical analysis with creative work, prioritizing hands-on exploration to teach students about Japanese visual culture and the mechanics of dynamic storytelling.” I’m wondering if you could tell us a little more about the course and this very interesting approach of combining “academic” study with more creative work? From a pedagogical standpoint, what do you think this approach offers students as opposed to more traditional academic courses?
Reginald Jackson: Thank you so much for the kind sentiment and questions, Hunter. It’s an honor to have been invited and I’m grateful to Prof. Christy Marran for nominating and hosting me, and to Prof. Workman and the AMES staff, Matha Mockus, Allison Klempka, and Summer Carreño, for all their invaluable logistical support getting settled in and situated with the class, in particular. The course grew out of a desire to activate some dormant drawing skills and try a new approach during a point in my teaching that was feeling too rote. A particularly cynical colleague tasked with planning course schedules had insisted I add “manga” to one of my courses so as to boost enrollment. After protesting a bit, I opted to instead see the appeal to pop culture as an opportunity to build a different audience for Japanese literature and visual culture, without abandoning the rigors of close reading and visual analysis. Fundamentally, the pedagogical premise is that good illustration demands careful observation, analysis, and an ability to communicate clearly while translating ideas between texts and images. One goal is always to improve critical reading and writing skills—ideally in a way that’s fun without sacrificing rigor.
I have tried to push an experimentation with active learning further in this practice-based course, which uses storytelling and illustration to foster different forms of confidence and underdeveloped competencies in students. It’s a difficult course because students have to balance submitting weekly sketchbook pages alongside regular critical writing assignments. So, they’ll have to do character or scene designs for Tanizaki’s “The Tattooer” (1910) or Kojiki (712), but only after they’ve answered questions about the protagonists’ motivations, main conflict, and which pivotal plot moments have the strongest visual appeal. The sketchbook pages have to be extensively annotated by the students themselves; this fosters both a habit of deliberate practice and a clear-eyed self-reflexive perspective on their work, so that they can continue teaching themselves. The ultimate goal is to impart skills that make me obsolete as a teacher!
I believe there’s a way to tap into students’ affinity for Japanese popular culture—not to mention their knowledge of it and sensitivities toward it—without pandering or undercutting serious analysis. Pedagogically, I also think there’s much to be gained from focusing on craft, active experimentation with tools and techniques, lots of mileage, and a “progress over perfection” ethos. I always say at the start of the term that however difficult drawing might be, the hardest thing about it is actually getting past all our ego around it. That comfort with and ideally contentment in failing often while moving forward is itself a skill that feels especially vital these days. Keeping a sketchbook in which to try things out and think things through, however imperfectly, can be transformative—particularly when the grading is actually based on the quality of the annotations far more than the skills of any drawing per se.
HM: Following that, you are known for being a scholar of medieval Japanese literature and performance, especially Murasaki Shikibu’s Heian era classic The Tale of Genji. How do you think this more creative approach your course takes helps students to understand Japanese literature and premodern Japanese literature specifically?
RJ: Despite the very relatable excavation of human relationships it portrays, Genji can be a monster in its sheer size, scope, and distance from our own time. The barrier to entry is high due to all the abstruse aristocratic idiosyncrasies and ornate poesy, even if students are willing to try hard to understand what’s happening. Therefore, I’m happy to use whatever methods might engage students and lower their apprehension toward the text. Some years back, when teaching a course called ”Love and Death in Japanese Culture,” I decided to try out an interactive Genji Scrolls activity where students has to read the text carefully and compete in teams to render calligraphic prefaces and “paintings” like those of the original twelfth-century scrolls. Sharpie fumes and some heated creative differences among groups notwithstanding, the level of discussion and the insights they produced was off the charts. I was surprised and heartened by what they came up with when they literally got their hands dirty and stopped being so scared by this revered cultural artifact. Once the text became fodder for this collaborative revision—a means to an end or a resource for making stuff—they opened up far more and noticed a slew of details they’d missed when trawling for content. In our modern world of thumb typing and perpetual undo and ubiquitous images, it’s all too easy to devalue the time and skill of premodern artists and artisans. These more hands-on activities activate different types of embodied knowledge and have all kinds of felicitous effects for a diverse group of learners with varying skill sets and competencies. One concrete example was watching a Chinese student who’d been pretty shy about sharing opinions in English morph into a rockstar once she got chosen to do the calligraphy for one group’s entry. Turns out more than a decade of handling a brush suddenly meant she could contribute meaningfully in this moment and her group mates were impressed, to boot!
HM: Additionally, as an artist and guitarist yourself, how does the Japanese Narrative Design Lab course reflect your own research and the relationship between your own scholarly work and creative pursuits?
RJ: So much to say on this, but to keep it short I’ll just say that the course has been a great outlet for me to leverage my love of comics and Japanese visual culture while also affirming skills and a sensibility that Standard Humanities Professor life had really squelched. I remember being so intimidated initially in graduate school when I took my first Art History course on illustrated handscrolls. All the students were so impeccably dressed and seemed so polished when making points…. But the professor (Yoshiaki Shimizu) was really encouraging and it turned out that a lifetime of reading comics and drawing meant that even though I didn’t know terms like “facture” and “lozenge” offhand, I could still make incisive comments about storytelling and brushwork and the depiction of motion, etc. I understood the form even though I lacked the disciplinary lexicon. That was a revelation for me and reminded me that we all have knowledges that can prove useful if given the chance and affirmation to bring them to bear on a given text or situation. Additionally, Shimizu made us copy Heian calligraphy as the best way to learn it; kinesthetic memory is key to learning how to read those squiggles. It prompted another insight: overthinking is much easier than actually doing the thing, and far less effective for understanding things, usually! Since then, I’ve tried to incorporate that lesson into what I do, from studying Noh dance-drama to doing master copies of various artworks to get a better sense of the aesthetic choices being made. It’s definitely made be much more aware of the minutiae of these texts and—for better or worse—and hopefully better able to explain their mechanics and significance to others. The same goes for music, one-hundred percent! One can learn to listen to a painting or detect rhythm and timbre in calligraphic columns and decorative foil textures.
HM: To me, one of the most inspiring aspects of your work is your ability and eagerness to approach premodern Japanese literature theoretically in fresh and delightfully unconventional ways. For example, your use of Queer Theory and Critical Race Theory, two quite contemporary trends in literary theory, to question the ways in which we read, think about, and understand premodern Japanese literature and performance. Could you tell us a little bit more about how you approach premodern Japanese literature through something like Queer Theory or Critical Race Theory? What do these kinds of theoretical lenses offer for understanding or thinking through premodern Japanese texts? Do you think that the study of premodern Japanese literature has something to offer Queer Theory or Critical Race Theory?
RJ: Thank you for saying that! In having been frustrated over the years with certain disciplinary strictures and mores that often felt more disabling than energizing—as both a student and a professor—I’ve been trying to make work that compels folks to read in rigorous but less fearful ways, even as I draw inspiration from far bolder scholars and artists who’ve inspired me. The (re)turn to visual art as a creative practitioner has also fueled that, but that relative freedom is very much a post-tenure and post-promotion to Full Professor kind of expansion, and it still very much a work in progress that has not been easy to manage! As I see it, part of my task is to convince students and scholars unfamiliar with premodern material that it offers a valuable opportunity to reframe current discussions concerning the intimate relationship between cultural politics and aesthetics. I say early in my second book that with A Proximate Remove: Queering Intimacy and Loss in The Tale of Genji, I wanted to write the book I wished I’d had as an undergrad studying Asian languages and being introduced to gender theory.
As for the question about the study of premodern Japanese literature having something to offer Queer Theory or Critical Race Theory, my answer would be “Absolutely.” For all kinds of deep-seated and deeply imperialist and racist reasons, to say nothing of Cold War institutional histories that resulted in a cordoning off of Asian Studies from so-called “Ethnic” studies, the presumption in Japanese studies has tended to be that our work has little if any connection to these theories. As I’ve argued elsewhere, much of that misunderstanding has stemmed from our failure as premodernists to make a case for the relevance or value of our materials and inquiry to larger, often more worldly conversations happened outside our boutique sub-field. Sadly, the proudly hermetic and positivist disposition baked into our field means that we’ve given smart theorists—and students—outside of it plenty of reasons to ignore us! I’ve tried to theorize this reciprocal neglect and offer ways to bridge the gap, however imperfectly. For example, in A Proximate Remove I emphasize how ill-equipped some strains of queer theory are to explain premodern Japanese culture given the foundational role male-male sexuality played in structuring Japanese society. By the same token, medieval Buddhist notions of transience and Noh’s showcasing of the captivating malleability of bodies and identities could broaden and complicate queer studies debates that tend to rely on capitalist modernity as a frame, avoiding a default presentist, Judeo-Christian, Eurocentric paradigm.
For both the Genji and the Noh context, this kind of reorientation moves away from queerness as chained to contemporary understandings of sexuality, toward more expansive and hopefully less overdetermined notions of living. In saying “TheTale of Genji is a queer text,” the goal is to explore a medieval Japanese text’s queerness to alter and enrich how we read in the present. I summed this up in the book when I wrote the following: “A Proximate Remove contends that Genji queers, where to queer is to press into question predominant logics of thought, feeling, and movement. […] Thus in saying that Genji queers, I mean to emphasize how the text imagines alternatives through both portraying and encouraging a generative estrangement from inherited structures—within and beyond the text. I argue that The Tale of Genji performs a queer critique in its insistence on the fictive, deficient, often unlivable nature of what prevails as the good life. […] The narrative depicts destabilizing encounters that inspire the characters to question the environment they must inhabit. I read their questioning propensity as queer in its reluctance to take the configuring rhythms of the given world for granted, or to accept them as sovereign.” This last part is what I’m always interested in across my projects: how to think and build in less limiting ways.
Spectacular Dominion, one of my current book projects, ventures new lines of inquiry into how personhood was defined and contested in premodern Japan, tracing shifting responses to the central question: How is personhood performed—both literally and symbolically—when one’s humanity is incessantly threatened? The broader ambition of this project is to challenge prevailing scholarly paradigms in premodern Japanese studies by raising questions significant to Performance Studies and Black Studies, drawing insights from critical race and queer theory, especially. My primary goal is to advance a transdisciplinary conversation about how the economic, performative, and ideological functions of slavery in dissimilar historical contexts were, in fact, fundamentally linked: essential to policing access to what Sylvia Wynter terms the “genre of the human” across regions, from the fifteenth century onward. Inspired by Wynter’s powerful reconceptualization of economic and ideological relations from a transhistorical, global perspective, I argue that various forms of performance bound to intranational and international systems of enslavement played an indispensable role in inscribing and revising the boundaries of personhood in Japanese society. I’m in the process of being pushed in my thinking by Black feminist scholarship coming out of the RaceB4Race initiative. We in Asian studies have much to learn from their pioneering work!
HM: Lastly, could you tell us a bit about what project or projects you’re working on now?
RJ: Sure, currently I’m revising two book manuscripts. The first examines contemporary feminist dance and is called Yasuko Yokoshi: Choreography Beyond Japanese Culture. This book is a collection of critical essays on the work of Hiroshima-born and formerly New York-based dancer and choreographer Yasuko Yokoshi. Ms. Yokoshi has earned multiple prestigious awards: selection by Dance magazine as one of its “25 Choreographers to Watch in 2001”; two “Bessie” Awards; a 2008 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award; a 2007 BAXTen Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; and was featured as “BEST TEN DANCE in 2015” by the New York Times; and the acclaimed Mori Ōgai Literary Award. The book project reorients and extends the work on gesture and legibility I’ve performed to date, while bridging Japanese Studies and Dance Studies. Ms. Yokoshi’s work fascinates me for her sincere investment in premodern Japanese literature and dance as malleable anchors for her contemporary praxis. I argue that her citation of orthodox forms like Noh and Kabuki (Bell) or medieval texts like The Tale of the Heike (Tyler) harnesses the trope of malapropism or mistranslation as a generative mode of cultural critique. This linguistic, embodied questioning propels feminist choreography that cunningly and often gracefully challenges reductive patriarchal, Orientalist, and self-mythologizing essentialist perspectives on Japan held by foreign and domestic spectators alike.
The second book is a much larger project called Spectacular Dominion: Slavery, Performance, and the Boundaries of Personhood in Premodern Japan. From Noh plays dramatizing the conflicts surrounding forced servitude to Jesuit missionaries who expanded the slave trade as they proselytized, “buying people” (hitokai) was a prevalent social practice in premodern Japan. Moreover, in the mid-19th century, American military missions to Asia deployed blackface minstrel performance as a tool of entertainment and subjugation. Although these historical examples don’t conform to a singular definition of “slavery,” they display the enduring significance of performance and enslavement to Japan’s cultural production and racial imagination. Spectacular Dominion explores the relationship between slavery and performance in premodern Japan by analyzing the intersection between embodiment, economy, and sovereignty. I do this by focusing on three historical moments. First, I investigate drama and dramaturgy of the early Muromachi period (1336–1573), when Noh plays about slavery emerged. Next, I examine the late-sixteenth century, when slave trade by Jesuit missionaries occurred between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Finally, I consider Commodore Perry’s 1850’s mission to Japan, when blackface minstrel shows abetted U.S. gunboat diplomacy in Asia. In each of these contexts, the relationships between status, spatial practices, gender, and racial formations become vital analytical concerns, particularly as they shaped how various forms of religious discipline or colonial subjection took hold.
Needless to say, the book is a bear, and I’m out of my depth for the early modern material, especially! But in a productive way, I think, and I’m learning a ton as I dig into new archives and newer approaches to thinking about race and performance. I’m really looking forward to holing up a bit more and making headway on the project next semester, even as I get to know more colleagues here and gain their input. Thank you again for your stimulating questions, Hunter, and many thanks to the AMES Department for hosting me as the Mary Griggs Burke Chair this year to continue developing this research!
