Reginald Jackson

Scholar Profile by Rachel Willis

Reginald Jackson is an associate professor of Pre-modern Japanese Literature at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. His research focuses on visual culture, performance, and literature in medieval/pre-modern Japan, with a particular emphasis on embodiment. He is the author of two published monographs: 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). He is also the faculty lead of the Japanese Studies and Antiracist Pedagogy (JSAP) project at the University of Michigan’s Center for Japanese Studies, and piloted the first “Antiracism and Japanese Studies” course at the university in the winter of 2021. His current manuscript-in-progress explores theatrical depictions of slavery in stage plays from pre-modern Japan, with a turn towards examining the relationship between slavery, racism, and performance in the Japanese context.

Full Interview Transcript

Willis: Thank you for joining me for Professor Jackson. 

Jackson: Great to see you and happy to talk.  

Willis: Yeah, thank you. So to start off, can you talk a little bit about how you arrived at your second book project?  

Jackson: Sure, I’m happy to. So the second book is called A Proximate Remove: Queering Intimacy and Loss in the Tale of Genji. And it’s–in terms of arriving at the project–so this second book is really about my trying to finish a bunch of unfinished business from the first project. The first book project is called Textures of Mourning: Calligraphy, Mortality, and the Tale of Genji Scrolls. And in that book, it was really about the relationship between writing and dying, calligraphy and what we would call calligraphic performance–in medieval handscrolls, and then how those are effectively repurposed in the modern era to do effectively a lot of cultural nationalist work that involves flattening what I call the “texture of mourning” in order to make this melancholic, but also really deeply reduced kind of flattened idea of pre-modern culture. But one of the things about that is that that was a tenure book. And so a lot of the trappings of, you know, performing expertise that are really important for that credentialing also really got in the way of making what I think are more interesting or bolder, less conventional types of arguments or types of readings. One way to think about it is that when I was shopping that first book, an editor said, “Yeah, this is really smart and really interesting. But–” At the manuscript stage, there was a lot of the queer readings and a lot of the things, particularly around male-male sexuality was in that early version, and he said, “Look, this is really great, but it’s going to be way too expensive to publish all these images. And it looks like you have two books here. Give me the one with all the sex–give me the sex book.” And it wasn’t–that wasn’t what it was, but his shorthand was like, “Take all that expensive art, historical, visual culture stuff, and, you know, save that. But I want this other stuff.” And I was really offended at first. It’s like, no, but you don’t understand, these readings are so intertwined and so forth, but I also needed to get a move on. And so I said, well, let me just try. Like, if I were to reframe the projects as a separate thing, how could I do that? And so I put together a proposal and he was really interested in it, and we didn’t end up working together in the end. But it was, it was really liberating in some way to not have to worry about the response from the field. I mean, part of the reason too, that I felt like, of the things that I could cut, a lot of that stuff was fair game, was that as a first book, I thought that the types of readings I was doing were going to offend a lot of people. Not because they were homophobic, although that’s certainly part of it that they’d never admit, but because it was–there’s tons of questions I’m trying to ask about rigor and the kind of queer reading I’m trying to do and tendencies in the field to foreclose questioning to you know, effectively the patriarchal bent of Japanese studies, you know, as a white supremacist product, particularly of the post-war period, those kinds of things weren’t going to go over well with people who had always had to–who were deeply invested in the products of that system, much like myself, but also much more invested in it than I–and it was going to be frankly, it was going to be career suicide to start with a book like that, even though the readings, you know, were actually very much there in the initial version of the first book. So I felt like, you know, I wanted to get back to those things. I was really interested and have been for a long time since, at least since undergraduate, in queer theory and gender theory stuff. And I wanted to, as I say, I think in the preface of the introduction, I really wanted to write the book that I wish I had as an undergraduate. And I felt like teaching a lot of undergraduates and graduate students over the last decade–plus it’s one of those things that is the most misunderstood, right? It’s one of those topics that–it is both fascinating to people, but also always the hardest to really get folks to really engage with, because there’s so many layers of preconceptions and kind of willed ignorance around these things, because it gets really to the heart of all these things that we hold so dear. So like, what is agency, if we’re talking about spirit possession, right? Or we’re talking about, you know, women are effectively robes and hair, you know, there’s a colleague of mine, Charlotte Eubanks, who wrote a really great book about these kinds of things about, you know, notions of the body. The body is not a body and you have reincarnation and you have all these other kinds of things in the Japanese context. The game is different and the kind of–particularly kind of liberal feminism and gender studies stuff, that’s overwhelmingly focused on the modern, you know, notions of a modern subjectivity, of a certain kind of liberal humanism and a certain kind of sense of freedom and agency that’s coming out of particularly kind of white spaces that just doesn’t–not only does it not apply, but it actually really, it really can steal some of the most interesting nuanced aspects of these cultures that they just don’t fit, you know. So I wanted to do that. I also, frankly, it was–it’s very much a post-tenure book. And so like as a practice of freedom, doing it partially as a kind of “fuck you” to people who would tell me it didn’t make sense or that it was a bad idea, or that they were worried about how rigorous it could be, but would never admit that they hadn’t done any of the reading in these other fields that I was reading in. So critical race theory stuff, queer studies stuff. I was really interested in pushing against that when I felt like I was–I had a firm enough employment situation that the risk was minimized. So that felt important too, frankly, in addition to the intellectual questions that I’ve been pursuing. So yeah. So yeah, I wanted to write something that undergraduate me would have really appreciated and I wanted to make it open-access for those similar sets of reasons.  

It’s like, look, the first book was like eighty-five bucks because it was so expensive to publish all those images. And it’s a gorgeous book, if I do say so myself, I worked really hard to get that money, but this was a different project and it was like, people might feel like it’s not rigorous enough, but I’m also trying to write in a simpler style and so forth to make it more accessible. And hopefully just, you know, give people a different kind of toolkits for reading these things, and seeing this text that’s so famous with a different set of, you know, to attune to them differently. 

Willis: Yeah, no, I really appreciate that ethos. And since I also work with both queer theory and critical race theory, kind of at the same time, I really liked the first chapter. I was re-reading it earlier today and I know in that chapter, you turn to looking at, like a reception history of The Tale of Genji in the 19th century and how these sort of ideas about white masculinity that were starting to be emulated in Japan at the time affected its reception, especially when it came to Genji’s depictions of male homoeroticism and fears that the story would hurt Japan’s image by being perceived as like too soft or too feminine. So first I was wondering if you could talk about why you decided to start with this, and then second, I was wondering if you could comment on how you sort of approach the process of kind of like parsing through how these ideas of race and sexuality were functioning together at this moment. Sort of–kind of your methodology for looking at this intersection. So, two-part question.

Jackson: Two-part question, yeah, sure. Yeah. No, thank you for that. So let’s start with, oh, I’ll get to the methodology part. I mean, one thing to say is that it became really clear to me. I mean, so I’m, I don’t know if you’d call it recovering, but yeah, I don’t really think of myself in these terms every day, but I’m a medievalist by training. So I work on things from effectively the 8th through the 12th century primarily, but then also things, kind of, medieval drama, so Noh drama. So starting in the 1300s effectively to the 1600s. So a lot of my wheelhouse is old Japanese stuff, performance, and literary and visual culture. And one of my frustrations has always been the way that folks who are–overwhelmingly the field–I think most fields actually tend to be–maybe less so in English literature–towards modernists, right, to folks who are working in the modern era. And one of the things that’s always frustrated me as a teacher, but then also just as a scholar having conversations with these folks is what happens–all the ways in which people take capitalist modernity for granted, and then just impose willy nilly these ideas onto the pre-modern period with no apology. And the idea that, you know, it’s–in graduate school I used to say, we used to joke about the fact that all of the literature people were expected to take history courses, but the history folks weren’t necessarily expected to take literature courses. And I say that to some history folks and they balk and it’s like, no, but of course, but like, they’re lying, you know, there’s nothing, right. You take another region, in the same century that you’re focused on, but you don’t really do literature courses. Right. And it’s a similar kind of, I think, myopia that I noticed around some of these things with Japanese things too, right. Where Japanese modern history and literature folks are much more familiar with and there’s a sense that the pre-modern stuff, so a thousand years of some of the best literature that’s ever been written in the world is just kind of incidental. So, you know, that doesn’t keep me up at night. You know, I don’t lose, I don’t lose sleep or cry myself, you know, cry on my pillow about that. But it’s one of those things that I felt like I had to historicize. I had to do a kind of genealogy of that neglect as a starting point before I could actually get into the reading. So at first I–that part wasn’t really what I was interested in. And in some ways this is me being, I think, pretty petulant at the time. I was like, okay, look, this is just going to be a book of readings of this text that every–that’s really famous, but I’m going to do it this way. I’m going to involve these thinkers that tend not to be kind of brought to bear on these things. And that should be enough. But then I realized that I couldn’t do that because first of all, it was dishonest in terms of the fact that like all of that neglect was shaped by all these anxieties and very conscious decisions about what to include and what to exclude, like, you know, what types of, not just in terms of like a narrative, but also what types of practices. Right. So, I mean, there’s scholars, in this field of Japanese sexuality studies, I mean, I think of folks like Greg Pflugfelder, there’s lots of–Michiko Suzuki–folks who’ve written about sexuality in the modern period, early modern period as well. You talk about that moment historically, if you’re going to again, do a genealogy in the Foucauldian sense like this point of emergence or divergence, right? Where this practice, set of practices, male-male love, which has been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years, suddenly becomes taboo. And there’s a shame around that. And that shame, like the production of that shame, has everything to do with the geopolitical situation that’s emerging at the time as a result of imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy. So it was really like getting over myself around, you know, feeling like if I–the simplest way I can say is like, I felt like it’s not fair that I always have to–what it felt like, kind of, really genuflect to the modernist desire to hear more about themselves. Like that was just kind of a drag. Like, it wasn’t fun. Like the fun part is doing the readings. But then I was talking, you know, and some folks, some of them very smart people, like Michael Bourdaghs at The University of Chicago, who is my favorite academic, in the Japanese studies field, hands down–you’re welcome, Michael–you know, said, you know, we were talking about this and thinking about the intervention and the contribution that the book could make. You know, if I was actually not just going to throw a smart tantrum and actually try to convince people who didn’t know any better, right. Didn’t know why they should care about some of these pre-modern things, and try to understand them with some fullness. If I wanted to kind of change their minds, then I had to address some of the things that were closer to home for them. And then when I started thinking of it that way–and again, the fact that maybe undergraduates in particular, that was a really a saving grace. I was like okay well, wait a minute, there’s lots of dyed in the wool tenured scholars, cis male or not, racist or not, who are going to feel a certain way, but if I’m thinking about the students, they’re just–they’re new to this, and this is really an opportunity now. And so when I changed the way I was thinking about the audience, I felt less salty about that lack of reciprocity in terms of what people are reading and what they refuse to read and you know, what they make time to read or not. And then it became a lot easier. It’s like, okay, well, first of all, this story that I can tell about why these kinds of questions or these kinds of themes or topics have been suppressed or ignored or actively written against in different ways, it’s actually really fascinating. And some of the quotes are really just kind of fun, you know? So the guy that’s raging against Genji for being too decadent and making, you know, strong men like himself, presumably look bad is hilarious. And you start to realize that there’s this theme historically, that keeps repeating where a version of that’s happening in the 19th century as Japanese statesmen are particularly feeling vulnerable, you know, when the US in particular shows up at the door with this gunboat diplomacy. And then also in the post-war period where there’s a different version of, let’s call it this effeminate elsewhere that really plays very well in the cold war period, as the U.S. is trying to rehabilitate Japan from being this kind of set of raging, you know, kind of monsters. And so it’s kind of trying to treat–when I started thinking about it more about like what pedagogically might be useful for folks who are still willing to give the pre-modern period the benefit of the doubt, who haven’t learned all those bad habits that we professors tend to inculcate, right, on the one hand, but then also recognize that the story itself is really fascinating and worth telling, if I could tell it my way, and think about things like the way that the racialization of Japanese folks as inferior was also part of why they were then tripling down on this ultra homophobic kind of thing. It’s like, oh, this is actually really interesting. And I knew that intuitively, but having to spell it out for the sake of making the case was really a good exercise. And I think that was part of what fueled the methodology. Beyond that methodologically, I mentioned kind of the notion of genealogy, which is important, but, you know, thinking about notions of racial formation was really important because that’s something that Japanese studies traditionally–should I say “we” now or “they?”–but we have been really bad at, because the focus has been really on linguistic mastery and prowess that way and–at the expense of things that seem much more superfluous, right. Or extraneous, like thinking about racial formation. And so–but since, with things like the slavery project, which I guess we’ll talk a little bit about too. 

Willis: Yeah. 

Jackson: That was foremost in my mind. And it was also one of these things where I felt like it was a good opportunity–and cathartic too, frankly, as someone who has very much kind of–had really drunk for a long time from the well of a certain kind of embedded respectability politics about–I mean, being a black scholar in this space, which is exceedingly rare, you know. Particularly being tenured, I don’t know, maybe there’s someone else out there, if you’re out there and you hear this, I’d love to meet you, but I don’t know anyone else. So the idea of, you know, in a subtle way to try to think about race explicitly in the context of this thing, which is to say The Tale of Genji, which is, you know, ostensibly written before we think about race, even in like the medieval period, or kind of the advent of mercantile capitalism, or kind of these phenotypical/religious things that Geraldine Heng talks about was–felt important, right? To say that this–to make, you know, this is last thing I’ll say on the point–that at a certain level, I started thinking, oh, what I want to do is to make it impossible, or at least very, very, very hard for anyone that is going to engage with this stuff after I talk about it to do so without citing some of these folks, and without thinking this way, without taking–thinking about the role that white supremacy has played in shutting down various types of questions and interpretive opportunities–to say nothing of actual structural opportunities for folks of color or queer folks say, you know, non-binary folks in the field. When you don’t have the tools to be able to talk about these things in serious ways that resonate with people who might just be curious, right. Like what happens? And one of the things that happens is they run to manga and anime. No hate, you know, that’s one of things that happens, or they go elsewhere. And so that’s part of what makes the field so deadened, because they’re numb to those other possibilities. So that’s what I was trying to work against.  

Willis: That makes sense. And you brought up the slavery project that you’re working on. I want to make sure we have time to talk about that, cause I know you’re looking at slavery in premodern Japan and its relationship to early modern formations of race in Japan. So I’m just wondering if that interest kind of grew out of the Genji project’s ethos and its turn towards race in that first chapter, or did you kind of come about this project separately?  

Jackson: Sure, yeah. I think if I’m being completely honest, a lot of the impetus for the slavery project, you know, comes from being African-American and having, you know, really been interested. I mean, so like not that, that then means that I want to talk about slavery, but that’s part of my experience. It’s part of my sense of how I move through the world. And, you know, when I, you know–it’s been a longstanding interest of mine to learn more about, let’s just say black history and culture and, you know, graduate school was really the first time that I was able to do that in earnest at a high level. And so I’m grateful to folks like Valerie Smith and Al Raboteau and, you know, folks who were really great about helping to teach me more about how to detect and engage with these things critically. So I think that one of the things that I was, I was looking to do again, just really honestly, is to affirm, you know–make the case for, but then affirm in relatively, I think, unapologetic terms, the centrality of thinking about black studies as a discipline for Japanese studies. And it’s a similar kind of thing with the queer book it’s like, you know, I think that there’s a lot of folks who are…folks who are willfully ignorant and then folks who just don’t know any better. And to say, look, I honestly believe that you can’t understand some of the nonsense that we see and the fascinating things too, but like, let’s say the racist nonsense in Japan unless you read Sylvia Wynter closely. And it became a kind of–it’s too aggrandizing to say mission, but kind of–at least in my teaching to say like, look, you can’t understand Japan unless you understand slavery and anti-blackness. Let’s just start from that premise. And it’s true historically. And so like, you know, I think if you start to understand, for instance, missionary activity, like the Jesuits and what they’re doing in terms of like how they’re racialized–you know, their sense of racialization is being built between Goa and Africa and the New World in terms of basically, you know, blacks, you know, the indios and then in this case kind of Japanese folks. When they say the Japanese folks are white, “white, like us,” and therefore this enterprise is going to be successful. And therefore, you know, Pope, you need to give us more money because we’re going to be much more successful. You know, they’re less barbaric than those other folks. That’s fascinating. That’s fascinating. And the fact that, I mean, again, a lot of folks, I mean, there’s more work more recently, particularly from folks working through Latin American studies and Japanese studies who are, you know, have Portuguese language under the belts and so forth, who are working, doing this kind of work, but generally speaking that hasn’t been, you know, a hot topic of debate for some of these same reasons.Yeah. Well, it–personally, because I think the overwhelming majority of folks who are professors in this field are white. And that’s not saying, therefore they’re not interested, but it just means that that inclination to think about these things, I think a lot of folks, frankly, and–some people have told me this–are just really deeply uncomfortable because they feel like they’re going to do a bad job, they can’t do it justice. Which I think is both sincere and often intellectually lazy, but that’s fine–to each his or her own. So I think that there’s something about wanting to make the case that, first of all, these connections are really vital to understand–partially to understand why our current world is the way it is. Right. Partially because I think the texts that I was coming across like, you know, medieval plays, plays about slavery from the 14th and 15th century were just really fascinating. And it seemed to me, they really resonated with me–not just because there were things that theorists of the time were saying that sounded a lot like things at William Pope L. is talking about in terms of, you know, pushing against hypervisibility or showing up to withhold as an ethos, as a kind of tactic, as a concept. You know, having read some of that stuff, it seemed to dovetail really nicely. And I just really, don’t like–I was really just sick of the kind of, I think it was deeply disingenuous, it was coming from a place of insecurity and feeling threatened–the claim that, oh, this doesn’t have anything to do with it historically and so therefore you can’t talk about it, which is–I understand, but that kind of positivism is exactly what all these books that I’m writing are kind of pushing against. Because I don’t believe that. These ideas–just because this person in medieval Japan was not black does not mean that they didn’t have really, you know, what I think of as really black things to say about his relationship to having his labor exploited. And a kind of consciousness around how that is structural. And, you know, we’ve been talking about the connection to–or relationship to the means of production or lack thereof, like what does that mean? And the folks who have done the best job of really thinking through that are, you know, black feminist scholars. So it felt important to highlight that and to really try to perform the necessity of engaging with some of that material as a means to understand Japanese culture better. And I actually–I’m not, that’s not just like a party trick. Like I’m actually, I honestly believe that. And it’s really been fascinating to see who’s down with that project and who has no time at all for that. And I’m convinced that it’s not because it’s actually not rigorous. I think it’s because it hits too closely, it cuts too close to the bone. And to really acknowledge the extent of that ignorance is also about acknowledging the privilege and frankly, the racism that’s built into the field that people don’t want to deal with.  So, the last, I mean, the quick thing to say at the end is just that, so both–all of the books have in common that set of questioning around things like performance, whether that’s gender performance or calligraphic performance, or let’s say drama or dance, or something like that, as a means of asking questions about, you know, how the world is given and to say, like, it doesn’t have to be this way. And all of the anxieties that erupt when people are trying to kind of contain these things or shut them down, you know, really produce all kinds of other ways to maneuver in really fascinating routes let’s say to a kind of fugitivity, kind of echoing Fred Moten’s sense of things–that I think is really worth investigating and actually does me personally very well, you know, kind of emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, but also I think it would be really useful for folks, students and scholars trying to learn about these worlds. 

Willis: Yeah. You tied that up really nicely. I guess the last question I’ll ask you is about early modern critical race studies as a field. And I don’t know that you would identify yourself as a scholar of that field, but I think your work is definitely–you’re doing that kind of work. And I think that early modern critical race studies as a field tends to focus on Europe as a site of early racial formation and early race ideology, especially England, France, the Iberian Peninsula, to a certain extent the Netherlands, just because of the continent’s history with colonialism in that time period. So I’m wondering if you can talk about what we miss when we leave Asia out of this conversation and particularly Japan. Because I haven’t seen a whole lot of interaction between people who are doing the kind of work that you do and people who are kind of working in this more European setting, and I feel like that relationship should be strengthened.

Jackson: Yeah, no, thanks. No. And the Dutch are, you know, in Japan, Nagasaki, and doing–there’s a lot of, I mean, you know, we read in the anti-racism course too, right. Some of the fascinating, right, privileges that the Dutch have that other groups don’t have and so forth. So like, you know, yeah. What do people miss? I mean, I think, you know, at a basic level, I think that one of the things that’s missed is…let’s say that at the methodological level is the ability or the opportunity to triangulate differently. So for instance, if you’re working–it’s happening, folks I think particularly Latin American studies, are aware of this, but like Europe-Africa-The New World, trying to think about those, like those, those three spaces in relation to one another, for instance, is really useful and necessary and has been increasing for a long time. It was just wanting to–you know, a kind of pervasive anti-blackness means, you know, the extent to which one is willing or able to engage with that becomes fraught–but I think that, you know, the example I gave for instance of what’s going on, let’s say from the mid-1500s through today, actually, but certainly through the time that that Commodore Perry arrives in the 1850s in Japan, too, with very deliberately tall, handsome, imposing, and armed to the teeth, black soldiers as–to scare the Japanese effectively, right. You know, tracing that genealogy and in a much more robust way is just fascinating, but also really useful, I think, because one of the things that you see in the Japanese case is exactly how Europeans who are used to actively, you know, snapping necks and cashing checks across the globe have to change when they get to Japan. So that’s fun to see, like, you know, as someone who’s not a fan of white supremacy on the one hand, but it’s also just fascinating because you start to realize that their own epistemologies have to shift in relation to this nonwhite civilization that in their own terms, right, deserves a certain kind of admiration, and that fucks them up. Like they don’t really know what to do with that, particularly since these people are also armed to the teeth. So you can’t just go in there with a galleon and start blowing things out. But I think that anyone who’s interested in intellectual history, the history of ideas, and certainly the history of racialization, would learn a lot from seeing how the Jesuits in particular have to navigate and practice things like, you know, a kind of respectability politics. So people that are, that are familiar with texts like Sepulveda and some of these texts on catechism and the struggles there and so forth, what it means to minister to the poor versus–the Jesuits say in Japan–realizing that ministering to the poor is the wrong thing, because Japanese folks don’t have time for poor folks. So just like at the tactical level of seeing how people are changing their comportment, right. Their comportment in everyday life as a way of being more effective missionaries, I think is just really great to see. It’s really interesting like that just at the archival level, like those documents are legit fascinating. And I think they offer a really great counterpoint to a lot of those–maybe things that people might take for granted–who are much more familiar, you know, with the context of Francophone Caribbean say, or the Iberian peninsula and so forth. And, yeah, I mean, to go back to Sylvia Wynter like, just, what does it mean to like–having to redefine the human in relation to Japanese folks who are not viewed as being subhumans? Like that’s the kind of pithier way to put it, but I think that this–that alone is worth the price of admission to say nothing of what happens when you start to understand Japan, what that’s not happening–I don’t think, certainly among native populations that are being decimated by genocide or in Africa in the same way–who then have–get on the fast track to an aspirational whiteness, frankly, in the 19th century as a means of trying to stave off, right. I mean, stave off their own subjection. So thinking about that pivot from what’s going on in the earlier part of the 19th century to something like the Russo-Japanese war, when the first time a nation–right, a nonwhite nation beats a white nation. That moment, which lots of people have written about, I think is–it’s interesting, but what they tend to miss is that longer historical duree, that long view, that you can trace all the way back to the medieval period, at least–to say nothing of the stuff that the Geraldine Heung talks about in the 1100s and 1200s in Europe. And I think having that just really fleshes out the story to an extraordinary extent. 

Willis: Well, thank you so much. I feel like there’s so much more to discuss but we’re limited by time. but I really appreciate your thoughtfulness and rich comments.  

Jackson: No, thank you so much for your really thoughtful and rich questions. It’s always a pleasure. I hope the project goes well and that these interviews prove useful for folks.