What does life in the university cost us, and what debts do our academic disciplines impose as we seek recognition within them? As Jackson pursues a career as a Black scholar of medieval Japanese culture, he has consistently found Black feminist and queer studies approaches illuminating and even indispensable for his research. But Jackson has also experienced hostility towards his presence and those approaches in his field to an extent that seems irreducible to mere personal taste. Indeed, surveying the scholarly landscape suggests an ignorance and allergy toward certain analytical methods that is not coincidental but instead deeply structural. In this presentation Jackson will historicize the geopolitical, sociological, and institutional factors shaping that animus as central to the production of Japanese Studies in the U.S. academy. Specifically, he will outline structural obstacles that have traditionally hindered recourse to more worldly, critical, and politically generative methods of analysis within certain fields, using historical examples and lessons learned conducting research for his previous monographs and his current book project on slavery and performance in premodern Japan. Through theorizing the politics of scholarly citation, Jackson hopes to identify and demonstrate methods of reparation through which to address intellectually deadening legacies of racial and gender-based discrimination that continue to curb our freedom as thinkers and drain our capacity to thrive as creative human beings.

Reginald Jackson is Associate Professor of premodern Japanese literature and performance at the University of Michigan.

Moderated by Dr. Andrea Mendoza from UC San Diego's Department of Literature.