CFP: Japanese Theater to 1900 at MLA 2027
Melissa
Liberatory Forms and Complicit Realities in Japanese Theater to 1900
Since the publication of Donald Shively’s seminal “Bakufu Versus Kabuki” in 1955, kabuki, and premodern performance arts more broadly, have often been cited as privileged spaces for subverting or otherwise troubling dominant forms of authority. Recent scholarship, however, has invited us to consider the more nuanced or complex engagement between performance and governmental, legal, or social authorities, including how theater producers could be complicit in censorship and self-policing, how performance could sensationalize or police the aberrant, or how theater could perpetuate or reinforce discourses of violence.
This panel invites papers that lean into these complexities in theater’s relationship to authority, capaciously conceived to extend to politics, law, social customs, religious attitudes, etc. Where, when, and why do our expectations for theater as subversive potential run into more complicated realities? How might these historical complicities prompt us to revisit larger frameworks or assumptions about power and/or performance in premodern Japan?