Professor of Pre-modern Japanese Literature
rjalc@umich.eduOffice Information:
202 South Thayer Street
5127 STB
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1608
phone: phone: 734.764.2023
Education/Degree:
Ph.D. Princeton University, 2007About
For most up-to-date information, please visit: https://www.reginaldjackson.com
Research Interests:
What I care about most as a scholar is the praxis of reading better: developing more creative, critically sensitive ways to engage texts. In this vein, my research and teaching explore legibility as a generative concept. The main venue for this inquiry is medieval Japan, though my current projects turn to early modern and contemporary texts. My research on premodern Japanese culture traverses three fields: literature, art history, and performance studies. Specifically, I concentrate on legibility’s relation to embodiment. The tactics bodies deploy to navigate aesthetic and political constraints intrigue me, whether they occur in calligraphic tracts or on Noh stages. Animating my research is this basic question: "How should bodies be read?" While my attempts to address the ethical, methodological, and disciplinary contours of this question plot a cursive path, all my scholarly work examines relationships between embodiment and legibility to some degree: in late-Heian handscrolls, medieval dance-drama, Afro-Asian sculpture, slide guitar, contemporary choreography, and The Tale of Genji. My abiding interests in critical theory stem from an ongoing search for ways to apprehend rhetorical or choreographic maneuvers more amply. Queer theory, critical race theory, performance theory, and phenomenological approaches feel most helpful for my research at present.
Current Projects:
My current scholarship focuses on questions of performance and performativity within Japanese culture. My first book, Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls, was recently published by the University of Michigan Press (2018). Textures of Mourning theorizes calligraphic performance to examine how dying and reading intersect across Genji's 12th and 21st-century scroll renditions.
A second book manuscript, A Proximate Remove: Queering Intimacy and Loss in The Tale of Genji (under review) explores the potentials and limitations of queer theory to consider intervals in Genji where dominant modes of interacting with the phenomenal world are interrupted, reoriented, and reworked—beyond questions of sexuality. Two other research projects are in earlier stages of development: one that explores the relation between slavery and performance in premodern Japan, and a second on Yasuko Yokoshi’s choreography. I maintain a deep investment in teaching and studying Noh drama. In the past year I've turned my attention back to writing about it in earnest in pieces like "Desiring Spectacular Discipline: Aspiration, Fraternal Anxiety, and the Allure of Self-Restraint in Nō’s Dōjōji" (forthcoming, Asian Theatre Journal) and "Frayed Fabrications: Feminine Mobility, Surrogate Bodies, and Robe Usage in Noh Drama" (under revision, Theatre Survey).
Beyond these writing projects, I am also committed to improving the study of Japanese performance and premodern Japanese culture, in particular. In addition to organizing events like the trans-disciplinary workshop, "Rethinking Premodern Japan: Territory, Embodiment, Exposure" (2015), I have also recently designed a program called the Japanese Performance Theory Workshop (JPTW) (summer 2017): https://jptw.asian.lsa.umich.edu. Through seminar-style discussions, performance analysis exercises, and writing critiques, this intensive summer workshop helped participants working on Japanese performance at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels develop better conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical tools.
Teaching Interests:
As a confessed method junkie, I’m always trying to map out how systems work—be they passages of Heian prose, Noh exorcisms, or networks of evangelization and enslavement. My reading, writing, and teaching develop recursively as I test approaches, then pivot to retool them. Discussions with thoughtful students fuel this process, sparking experimentation on the page and in the classroom. My teaching aims to make students more skilled at critical thinking, more aware of deeper truths, and more confident in making conceptual and historical links between texts in ways attuned to their own experiences.
I teach a range of undergraduate and graduate courses. These include “Critical Introduction to Asian Studies,” “Love and Death in Japanese Culture,” “Noh Drama,” “Bodies and Boundaries in Premodern Japan,” “Japanese Performance Culture,” “Apprehending Gesture in Japanese and African-American Performance,” “Performance/Theory/East Asia,” and the “Japanese Narrative Design Lab,” a practice-based class on visual storytelling techniques in which students learn to analyze Japanese narratives and draw from them—quite literally—to craft their own tales.
On a final note, let me say that long before any academic credentials were earned, my first loves were illustration and guitar. I believe these skills of visual storytelling and composing music energize how I approach intellectual problems encountered today in disparate sectors. In other words, if I’m any good at interpreting handscrolls or sketching kabuki clashes, blame that metric ton of comics in my mother’s basement; it anchored doctoral training to a degree I can only appreciate in retrospect. Why mention this? For at least two reasons: to affirm imaginative instincts institutionalized rubrics of excellence and expertise routinely devalue; and to encourage students to make their individual skills and creative intuition the basis of whatever style of inquiry they pursue. Students interested in talking shop or pursuing graduate studies here or elsewhere are welcome to contact me.
Selected Publications:
Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls (University of Michigan Press, 2018)
“Gallows Hospitality: Visiting Hangman Takuzō’s Garden Theater” (TDR: The Drama Review, 2018)
“Homosocial Mentorship and the Serviceable Female Corpse: Manhood Rituals in The Tale of Genji” (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2017)
“Suspensions: Some Thoughts on Yasuko Yokoshi’s Recent Work” (Movement Research: Performance Journal, 2013)
“Dying in Two Dimensions: Genji emaki and the Wages of Depth Perception” (Mechademia, 2012)
About
For most up-to-date information, please visit: https://www.reginaldjackson.com
Research Interests:
What I care about most as a scholar is the praxis of reading better: developing more creative, critically sensitive ways to engage texts. In this vein, my research and teaching explore legibility as a generative concept. The main venue for this inquiry is medieval Japan, though my current projects turn to early modern and contemporary texts. My research on premodern Japanese culture traverses three fields: literature, art history, and performance studies. Specifically, I concentrate on legibility’s relation to embodiment. The tactics bodies deploy to navigate aesthetic and political constraints intrigue me, whether they occur in calligraphic tracts or on Noh stages. Animating my research is this basic question: "How should bodies be read?" While my attempts to address the ethical, methodological, and disciplinary contours of this question plot a cursive path, all my scholarly work examines relationships between embodiment and legibility to some degree: in late-Heian handscrolls, medieval dance-drama, Afro-Asian sculpture, slide guitar, contemporary choreography, and The Tale of Genji. My abiding interests in critical theory stem from an ongoing search for ways to apprehend rhetorical or choreographic maneuvers more amply. Queer theory, critical race theory, performance theory, and phenomenological approaches feel most helpful for my research at present.
Current Projects:
My current scholarship focuses on questions of performance and performativity within Japanese culture. My first book, Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls, was recently published by the University of Michigan Press (2018). Textures of Mourning theorizes calligraphic performance to examine how dying and reading intersect across Genji's 12th and 21st-century scroll renditions.
A second book manuscript, A Proximate Remove: Queering Intimacy and Loss in The Tale of Genji (under review) explores the potentials and limitations of queer theory to consider intervals in Genji where dominant modes of interacting with the phenomenal world are interrupted, reoriented, and reworked—beyond questions of sexuality. Two other research projects are in earlier stages of development: one that explores the relation between slavery and performance in premodern Japan, and a second on Yasuko Yokoshi’s choreography. I maintain a deep investment in teaching and studying Noh drama. In the past year I've turned my attention back to writing about it in earnest in pieces like "Desiring Spectacular Discipline: Aspiration, Fraternal Anxiety, and the Allure of Self-Restraint in Nō’s Dōjōji" (forthcoming, Asian Theatre Journal) and "Frayed Fabrications: Feminine Mobility, Surrogate Bodies, and Robe Usage in Noh Drama" (under revision, Theatre Survey).
Beyond these writing projects, I am also committed to improving the study of Japanese performance and premodern Japanese culture, in particular. In addition to organizing events like the trans-disciplinary workshop, "Rethinking Premodern Japan: Territory, Embodiment, Exposure" (2015), I have also recently designed a program called the Japanese Performance Theory Workshop (JPTW) (summer 2017): https://jptw.asian.lsa.umich.edu. Through seminar-style discussions, performance analysis exercises, and writing critiques, this intensive summer workshop helped participants working on Japanese performance at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels develop better conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical tools.
Teaching Interests:
As a confessed method junkie, I’m always trying to map out how systems work—be they passages of Heian prose, Noh exorcisms, or networks of evangelization and enslavement. My reading, writing, and teaching develop recursively as I test approaches, then pivot to retool them. Discussions with thoughtful students fuel this process, sparking experimentation on the page and in the classroom. My teaching aims to make students more skilled at critical thinking, more aware of deeper truths, and more confident in making conceptual and historical links between texts in ways attuned to their own experiences.
I teach a range of undergraduate and graduate courses. These include “Critical Introduction to Asian Studies,” “Love and Death in Japanese Culture,” “Noh Drama,” “Bodies and Boundaries in Premodern Japan,” “Japanese Performance Culture,” “Apprehending Gesture in Japanese and African-American Performance,” “Performance/Theory/East Asia,” and the “Japanese Narrative Design Lab,” a practice-based class on visual storytelling techniques in which students learn to analyze Japanese narratives and draw from them—quite literally—to craft their own tales.
On a final note, let me say that long before any academic credentials were earned, my first loves were illustration and guitar. I believe these skills of visual storytelling and composing music energize how I approach intellectual problems encountered today in disparate sectors. In other words, if I’m any good at interpreting handscrolls or sketching kabuki clashes, blame that metric ton of comics in my mother’s basement; it anchored doctoral training to a degree I can only appreciate in retrospect. Why mention this? For at least two reasons: to affirm imaginative instincts institutionalized rubrics of excellence and expertise routinely devalue; and to encourage students to make their individual skills and creative intuition the basis of whatever style of inquiry they pursue. Students interested in talking shop or pursuing graduate studies here or elsewhere are welcome to contact me.
Selected Publications:
Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and The Tale of Genji Scrolls (University of Michigan Press, 2018)
“Gallows Hospitality: Visiting Hangman Takuzō’s Garden Theater” (TDR: The Drama Review, 2018)
“Homosocial Mentorship and the Serviceable Female Corpse: Manhood Rituals in The Tale of Genji” (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 2017)
“Suspensions: Some Thoughts on Yasuko Yokoshi’s Recent Work” (Movement Research: Performance Journal, 2013)
“Dying in Two Dimensions: Genji emaki and the Wages of Depth Perception” (Mechademia, 2012)
