Faculty Spotlight: Excerpts from an interview with Dr. Reggie Jackson

Hohner Porter: How would you define performance studies? How is it (or not) a useful category for you? 

Reggie Jackson: The thing that comes to mind first, like Richard Schechner, is this kind of broad spectrum approach. That’s what’s useful to me in my research but also in teaching. What’s always been attractive to me is this kind of performance studies — evidence of discipline, but also not anti-discipline. It’s not someone who was really trained in a kind of area studies model, like Japanese literature, and is much more conservative, regionally specific, and much less theoretically inclined. For me, it’s a range of approaches designed to theorize performance in the broadest possible fashion. That’s the working definition I want to use and, I think it’s important to say that as a field, that allows one to have emphases whether that’s in terms of dance studies or critical race theory or etc. I liked the idea of that as space to layer different types of approaches and methodologies as opposed to a place where that’s its best incarnation. That’s one of the things that differentiates performance studies from a lot of other disciplines that have a longer history. 

HP: What role do you think performance studies plays in our current political and social climate, and how can it help us learn and grow from it? 

RJ: Nothing can really be fought effectively unless it is studied effectively first. Performance studies offers lots of tools to study the nature of the beast that one would have to confront. One of the things that’s increasingly apparent is that in much the same way that we think about something like intersectionality coming out of black feminist discourse, and the importance of thinking about race, class, gender, and all these different kinds of categories of difference as intersecting in order to understand oppression. I would say that’s something performance studies does well. If one can understand the mechanics of say a political rally, and understand it’s not just about reading signs and understanding the relationship between aesthetics and politics, I think performance studies is really good at that. It’s been a long history of actually doing that kind of work, understanding politics as a form of theater, staging in terms of rallies, and the way bodies are situated in space or not, attendance numbers are or not, and how that plays into the end of the media representations that seem to present an image of the political or the polity and how that fails. Maybe a slightly pithier way is that with performance studies, you don’t resort to that reductive notion of politics. You can’t. If you’re paying attention to temporality, staging, rhetoric, and identification and how that is being solicited from different audiences at different times, then it has to make you much more skeptical of a certain version of the political that’s being sold.  I think that performance studies really has a pole position to be able to unpack a lot of those dynamics. It’s been great to see things like Black Lives Matter around. Just a much more vocal, less apologetic capacity for people to put that discourse front and center as opposed to having to apologize for it. The fact that racialization can be a part of analysis and is now clearly central to that, is also really an opportunity. It’s become more mainstream, at least in certain links. Beyond that, it means that one can focus on much subtler types of operations because the heavy lifting in some ways is done. There’s always work to be done.

 HP: What are you working on now? Where do you feel that research is headed? 

RJ: In terms of research, I just finished a book, and it’ll be coming out in June of 2021. It’s called A Proximate Remove: Queering Intimacy and Loss and the Tale of Genji, and it’s a set of queer readings of this iconic and arguably most famous work of Japenese literature. This in some ways is all about sex, loss, and intimacy, and intimacy that is not sexual. It’s much more in the course studies vain, so a lot of the effect and sensation and thinking about relationships between performativity and intimacy and how to theorize those things in relation to one another. 

There’s a piece that I have under revision for women performance. It’s a piece on a dancer and choreographer called Baby Q and her performance of a certain kind of “Cyborg” persona but then also around questions of maternity in Japan. This kind of aging society and sexism and how her dance is trying to respond to that. There’s another piece which is on slavery and performance, the second of those is a book on slavery and performance in pre-modern Japan. The second article is a contextualization on the reading of a medieval Japanese play about slavery. It’s a masked Japanese drama that’s still performed today. It’s a play that dates from the 14th century, and interestingly, there’s a girl who sells herself into slavery to effectively pay for funerary rites for her parents. She then asks a preacher, who is also a performer, dancer, and entertainer to do those rights. He is so moved by her plight that he goes and confronts the slavers and says that he won’t allow her to go with them. As payment for her manumission, they say she has to perform these dances and wear these costumes for them. There’s basically three historical moments that I’m focusing on in the book. One is the medieval moment ofthese plays about slavery. 

The second is the Jesuits in the 16th and 17th century and their relation to the slave trade between Africa, Europe, Asia and then the New World, and around things like a crackdown on Christianity — them performing a certain type of piety, in a time where they are not actually the dominant race or power and what that entails. In the last moment, it has to do with minstrelsy. In 1853 there’s a mission for the United States to “open” Japan, in that context, Commodore Perry travels to Japan with these gunboats but also with a full, true blackface minstrelsy troop. The basic question is, out of everything to bring,  why the hell do you think it’s important that blackface minstrels is one of them, and trying to understand the function of blackface minstrelsy in gunboat diplomacy. And in doing so, questioning what it means to use blackface minstrelsy in a didactic fashion and to try to unite the white and the Japanese folks in their aversion to objecting these black bodies as a way to convince the Japanese of the superiority of white men. 

Then there’s another book that hopefully will get done before that. It’s a study of a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker named Yasuko Yokoshi. She was born in Hiroshima and based in New York for a long time, but is now back in Kyoto, Japan. The title of the book is “Yasuko Yokoshi: Choreograph and Translation Beyond Japanese Culture.” She’s an award-winning writer, but I’m interested in how she is really interested in traditional Japanese culture. She goes into Kabuki studies, a kind of traditional Japanese dance, and puts these things into fascinating juxtapositions. She does things like deliberately having Japanese performers who don’t speak English at all recite English language, or has American trained vocalists learn Japanese chanting techniques. So you always hear that accent and she doesn’t ever try to smooth that away. And so even as you’re watching this, you see a kind of ballet and Kabuki dance together and on the same stage, and she lets them have that friction in the midst of the performance. She’s not trying to over-accentuate the Japanese aspect or smooth away the things that would domesticate these kinds of things. So the politics of it, partially feminist politics, is about not allowing the audience to buy into some kind of unproblematic notion of Japanese culture as either especially refined or this epitome of the aesthetic. It raises questions about cultural appropriation and waste, and is the most interesting that I’ve seen particularly coming from Japanese artists. 

HP: What sparked your interest in these projects? 

RJ: It’s often pretty serendipitous. With the Moscow project, I was teaching at the University Chicago. Someone reached out to me out of the blue because they were looking for someone to interview her as a discussant as a part of this performance who’s local and knew things about Japanese culture. For some of the other things in Japanese culture more broadly, I started studying Japanese in high school my sophomore year, because I failed the Spanish placement tests and had to take Japanese. In fact, I had no interest in Japanese culture. I didn’t know anything about Japan besides the super fascinating and compelling, racist version that I learned from “Karate Kid”. It was really through high school Japanese class that I was introduced to Japanese language. When I got to college, I was studying Japanese, I said I wanted to just put these together and do Japanese literature. I was able to study abroad in Japan and Kyoto my junior year and did a homestay, it was also this holistic art, so you had costumes. They were hundreds of years old and the masks that were carved were works of art unto themselves. People would say that, “this art has been in our family for 600 years”, or that their grandfather died on the stage, and they want to die like he died, it’s very cultural. I didn’t really get to understand the extent of it then but the seriousness around it, it was not a hobby, this was like a lifelong pursuit. I had never seen anything like that. So for me, it was really compelling and made me want to study it more in graduate school, write a thesis on the use of robes and literature and drama, and think about it in a sincere but ultimately pretty superficial way. What are these things meant to assemble but then also what do they mean on stage? How do people use them? How do we think about the performance and how are these things employed?

My work in  African American cultural studies and literary studies slavery is something that I’ve been thinking about. Some of the most interesting work conceptually that I’ve read in the last two decades has been coming out of African American Studies and Black Studies. I learn a lot from them, and the question was what can I do with this in the context of Japanese literature? Many times it was not very much, partially because of historical overlap, partially because of the real disciplinary politics of policing that would really impugn any kind of work that I would want to do. And so, more recently in the last five years, a lot of the ideas have come from an engagement with Black Studies, dance studies, and Queer Studies and trying to look for corollaries, and trying to figure out what doesn’t fly and what does. I don’t talk about anything that I don’t find deeply interesting. Hopefully, as I get slightly smarter or at least more attuned to more subtle things it’s understanding, in Japanese context especially, that there’s a whole kind of training, if not virtuosity, that comes from that austerity and that kind of internal control and concentration and not just that kind of ballet leaping jumping. 

HP: How would you describe your identity in your performance studies work? 

RJ: I identify as Black and African American, born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Southside poor working class. A lot of the work that I’m doing now with the slavery project in particular, is a way to acknowledge things like systemic inequality things like white supremacist structures and still get credit for it. These things have been on my mind but also in my daily life around surveillance policing, politics of respectability, and that kind of performance. What does it mean to choreograph a boycott, or sit in nonviolent protests? I haven’t been able to talk about them in my work because it’s been far afield from my work. So, part of what I’ve tried to do — and in somewhat clumsy ways — but increasingly, hopefully, with some degree of facility, is to try to take some of those concerns more seriously and try to incorporate them into my research. One of things I need to do is learn Portuguese and Latin for this project, to be able to think about what these Jesuit priests are lying to the Vatican about and other things. My identity as an African American, cisgendered guy, doesn’t determine my projects in any kind of explicit way, except I’ve had to think, as far as I know, I’m the only person of African descent that’s tenured in this particular field, which is a pre-modern Japanese literary studies. Maybe there’s a bunch of folks that I don’t know about, but it’s a pretty small field.

It means that, even to do something related to performance opens up things more than just doing literature, and I’m interested in having freedom to think and to move conceptually, anything that’s going to grant me that is attractive to me. But the supremacist  nature and history of my “home discipline,” has driven me to look outside of it for spaces that might be more expansive and more supportive. So, what conferences do I want to present at, and where am I going to get a fair, if not even compelling, hearing. Because I don’t find that that’s necessarily the case in the literary Japanese studies spaces, where it can seem as am I serving as a token in this space, or are people just really fucking weird when they approach me and their white liberal awkwardness, or their just general anti-social Japanese literary awkwardness is kind of being worked out in my vicinity. 

I think it’s fair to say that a lot of the problems with my “home discipline” have sent me looking for other spaces to inhabit, and the spaces that tend to be more closely aligned with performance studies have been more hospitable. The first piece I ever published in graduate school, was a piece on slide guitar and Black woman’s locality. I didn’t think about that. It’s because I play guitar I don’t think of that as racially based but in the same way that if you’re a student of percussion, you study Afro Cuban. You don’t have to like it, but what are you missing to not do that, in the same way if I studied guitar. There are some folks who in their own kind of quiet, or not so quiet, racism would love to ascribe. They don’t know what to make of me because I haven’t talked as much about those things. I haven’t written about Black things, and I think that’s actually a kind of thing that is really frustrating for colleagues I have who are Black folks working on Black things in Japan with mixed race stuff or Dancehall or Japanese writers interest in African American literature. It’s that there’s a more obvious overlap between racial identity and their topic of study or with other disciplines. 

So in some ways, avoiding topics that would invite that kind of nonsense is also something that I’m less concerned about now; for the first time I’m teaching a course next semester on anti-racism and Japanese culture, slavery in Japanese, minstrelcy internment camps and World War II, occupation, and things that go into Black Lives Matter and it’s coverage in the Japanese media. Circumstances of the moment solicited that kind of critical engagement with all of these different things — Japanese racism and Anti-Blackness as a thing that, sadly, but certainly, truly transcends culture. 

HP: Outside of your performance studies projects, I know that you are interested in slide guitar. What sparked your interest in that style of playing? 

RJ: One of the first books when I first started playing guitar in high school was this book that was an excerpt of interviews from  guitar legends. So, Albert Lee, Eddie Van Halen, Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King, Albert King, and all these folks. But for the B.B. King, it mentioned that his cousin was Bukka White, a slide guitarist. It talked about his vibrato, that really distinctive kind of that butterfly/hummingbird vibrato that he was interested in, and then Django Reinhardt, this kind of gypsy jazz that you hear with it, the super quick vibrato, but also, slide vibrato. I hadn’t heard of it at that point, all of my guitar stuff was coming from the radio. This was in the mid 90s, the heyday of grunge, short of Pearl Jam. I would listen to a smooth jazz station, classic rock station, and country. There were these interesting moments either between George Thorogood, in some ways, the rock version of Johnny Winter, but then the Allman Brothers, so I would hear Duane Allman and I dug the sound. I saw some things on PBS like a Stevie Ray Vaughan special, Austin City Limits, and these kinds of things where there’d be Bonnie Raitt playing. I was like, “What is that about?” I was interested in it, hearing two things actually. One was Duane Allman playing the intro to “The Weight” but then also Sacred Steel and Derek Trucks. Eventually, I heard some of his stuff and I was like, “Oh, this is super cool.” The other thing that was really huge, circa ‘92, ‘93, was also when Eric Clapton’s “Unplugged” album came out. I didn’t have that album, but in the Campus Center of Amherst College, they did, I could listen to “Malted Milk” and “Walking Blues,” and wore those out. That version of “Walking Blues” was amazing, and once I had that, I just went to the music library and listened to anything that I could get. 

There was all this kind of country blues stuff, but they became really popular in the ‘60s especially when white blues artists were trying to go back to the roots of the blues. When I started to listen to more of that, I listened to anything that had slide on it. Derek Trucks, particularly in the “Out of the madness” CD and then later on “Soul Serenade” I was like “I have to figure this out”. 

So, that became an interest. In some ways, similar to Japanese Noh, I liked that it took discipline. You can’t press too hard, you have to kind of really focus on the note and listening. So, I really liked that too as a kind of antidote to a lot of the stuff which I love. I also realized that I could appreciate it and be excited by it, but I also like the things that seemed more contemplative. Once I heard Sonny Landreth, I thought that this is, in some ways, not as flashy as some of the other stuff, but it’s much harder to execute. That was part of what attracted me to it.

Hohner Porter is a graduate student at the University of Michigan pursuing degrees in Percussion Performance and Chamber Music. Hohner has traveled to Trinidad and Tobago where he was a participant of the Youth Music Exchange, presenting masterclasses over Samba Reggae from Brazil as well as performing with the Pulse Percussion Ensemble in outreach concerts in local primary schools. In 2019, Hohner traveled to Ghana to study West African drumming through the Dagara Music Center. Hohner has been a member of numerous chamber ensembles including UTM Choro Ensemble, UTM Steelband, Vencedores, UTM Contemporary Music Group, World Percussion Ensemble, and other various large ensembles.