Poets, Paragons, and Literary Politics: Sugawara no Michizane in Imperial Japan
Robert Tuck examines the Meiji reception of the Heian scholar and poet Sugawara no Michizane (845–903) to outline the development of several influential modern narratives of Sino-Japanese literary relations. Beginning with the views of Michizane held by Edo-period Confucian scholars, he proceeds to cover key debates among Meiji scholars concerning Michizane as an icon of imperial loyalty and as a kanshi poet of “utmost sincerity” (shisei). In the 1890s literary scholars attacked all Heian kanshi writing as insincere and formalistic, but from 1902, the one-thousandth anniversary of Michizane’s death, other scholars made Michizane the focus of a new narrative in which Japan overcame the linguistic obstacles of literary Chinese and domesticated kanshi. By analyzing Meiji scholars’ discourse on Michizane, Tuck reveals the cultural and ideological currents that continue to influence narratives of Sino-Japanese literary history to the present day.
Songs of the Righteous Spirit: "Men of High Purpose" and Their Chinese Poetry in Modern Japan
Matthew Fraleigh examines how "men of high purpose" (shishi), a group of mid-nineteenth-century samurai who embraced nationalist causes, wrote poetry to fashion themselves in the image of heroes and statesmen of Chinese antiquity. Focusing in particular on their creative adaptation and re-envisioning of Wen Tianxiang's "Song of the Righteous Spirit," Fraleigh analyzes how Fujita T?ko, Yoshida Shōin, Takasugi Shinsaku, Saigō Takamori, and others reworked specific Chinese allusions and texts, which in turn circulated as an intertextual currency among the shishi. Through writings thus enriched by a selfreferential intertextuality, shishi forged important social and literary connections among themselves. The process of naturalization, argues Fraleigh, happened not through the de-sinification of the poetic form itself, but rather through the exploitation of an expanding discursive sphere that became increasingly contemporaneous and localized.
“To those who choose to follow in our footsteps”: making women/LGBT+ soldiers (in)visible through feminist “her-story” theater
Building on Judith Butler ’ s understanding of visibility as “ the object of continuous regulation and contestation, ” art/aesthetics studies in international relations, and feminist theater studies, we identify feminist “ her-story ” theater as a unique site where Western “ gender-/sexuality-inclusive ” soldiering is visibilized, contested, and subverted. Drawing on ethnographic observations of two award-winning dramas, interviews with artists and military hosts, and ﬁ ndings from a wider research project on contemporary British military culture, we reveal the key role of heteronormative and patriarchal cultural discourses in reproducing the ambivalent positionalities of women/LGBT+ soldiers. We argue that the very visibility of women/LGBT+ soldiers on the stage paradoxically operates to make the complexities of – and struggles against – masculinized heteronormative military cultures invisible. Furthermore, despite artists ’ attempts to dissociate empowerment through soldiering from the problematic context of modern con ﬂ icts, “ her-story ” theater ultimately entrenches gendered/racialized hierarchies that normalize Western military interventions. We conclude that only through sustained feminist re ﬂ ection on the contours of “ imagined ” futures of female/ LGBT+ soldiering can this persistently problematic (in)visibility be productively disrupted.