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. Hi
Please RSVP at tinyurl.com/JacksonEAC by November 26 at noon.