Faculty & Staff

Faculty

portrait

Reginald Jackson


Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
(on leave 2009-10)
773-702-1255

CV

Teaching and Research Interests:

Japanese literature, calligraphy and illustrated handscrolls of the Heian and Kamakura periods;
Noh drama and dramaturgy; performance studies; literary and critical race theory

My research and teaching address questions of legibility and embodiment in relation to the ethics of representation. Broadly speaking, I am interested in how discursive boundaries are constructed, how they seek to contain the cultural products and performances against which they are defined, and how these strategies of containment attempt to manage the movement of bodies and regulate how embodiments of excess are read. Specifically, I explore questions concerning legibility and materiality as they relate to premodern Japanese literature, art, and performance. My work draws from and contributes to the fields of Performance Studies, Japanese Studies, African-American Studies, and Queer Studies, as well as current debates on cultural essentialism and national identity.

I am currently completing revisions for a book manuscript, tentatively titled “Midare Performance and the Ethics of Decomposition,” which examines tropes of degenerescence in relation to conceptions of virtuosity and the ethics of representation in medieval Japanese illustrated handscrolls and calligraphy. This project focuses on the Genji monogatari emaki (ca. 1140) and the midare-gaki, or "tangled script" passages of its "Minori" and "Kashiwagi" sections. I'm interested in theorizing this writing's movements in relation to depictions of dying in the text. By analyzing the particular techniques through which these stylized portrayals are produced, I argue that midare resonates with a decompositional tenor whose graphic effects threaten to overrun the bounded spaces in which they maneuver, even as this arrestingly corporeal and virtuosic movement sustains and accentuates the framing limit it runs against. 

Although this first project might be described as a ‘pre-modern’ project in terms of the historical periods in which the art objects and performances I analyze were initially produced, I also underscore emphatically the point that the works gesture far beyond these “original” historical contexts precisely to the extent that their midare movements persistently outstrip the temporal frames situating them. In their unsettling spectacularity and skewed relation to standard temporal frames, these movements in turn impel recurrent desires to suppress and regulate their scope.

In my teaching, I work hard to teach my undergraduate and graduate students how to read well. I tend to think of this as the difference between “reading” and “reading,” with the former often marking a desire to accumulate content about an object of study one believes oneself to have a stable grasp of, while the latter, in my opinion, involves a self-reflexive critique of one’s assumptions and positionality in the process of apprehending the text at hand. In my courses, this involves both walking students through the particular nuances of understanding kana calligraphy from the Heian through Muromachi periods and helping them to understand the historical and political contexts in which that writing signifies. More than thinking of reading as a simple functional task of decoding written symbols, then, I stress the importance of grasping as much of the work’s context of production, shifting critical reception, and, perhaps most importantly, the legacies of imperialism and contemporary institutional conditions that have come to discipline our habits of reading.

My pedagogical methods have been enriched by my experiences interpreting for professional Noh actors as a participant in the Kyoto Art Center’s Traditional Theater Training Program. As a result of assisting in this intensive training program for three consecutive sessions, I've gained greater facility (and patience) in communicating minute details related to the execution of physical movements, and in negotiating a range of cultural differences, expectations, and prejudices among diverse sets of international participants and Japanese performers. Positioned—quite literally—between these bodies, I did far more than merely “interpret,” very often playing the role of surrogate instructor as well. This status required me to devise various strategies of improvisational teaching in which dance pieces had to be constantly rethought and tailored to suit each individual's personality, pace, and style of learning.

Serious students interested in undertaking graduate work in Japanese literary and cultural studies are welcome to contact me. 

Selected Publications: