Reginald Jackson, "Acting Out the Text"

or, how to get your intellectual hands dirty

We make a text into itself by how we attend to it.

Reading is a practice of attention, and one that involves the entire body.

In this video, Reginald Jackson offers a way to think about what happens in a pedagogical setting when we bring a text forth through our bodies, and in community with others. (Though his examples are drawn from the classroom, this is a Seed that also has implications for textual practices beyond a university teaching context.)

This might look like acting out the text, drawing it, vocalizing and hearing it in the space of the room. The communal aspect of this practice is important: how a text (such as, for example, the Kojiki) sounds in different people's mouths and how it comes forth through different bodies' gestures can disrupt assumptions - about expertise, about which voices belong in a room, about commonalities or differences - that we might otherwise make about texts, ideas, and the humanities itself.

Acting a text, as you'll hear from Jackson, engages the senses differently, brings a dimension of spatial awareness into how we understand what's happening on a page, helps us to ask questions about how rituals, bodily gestures, and other material forms are embedded in the words themselves.

You'll hear him refer, at one point, to the idea of "looking at the fish." This has emerged as a point of discussion between Jackson and Nappi over years of conversations about pedagogy and many other things, and refers to the gesture toward an anecdote about Louis Agassiz's teaching practice as described in Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading, sometimes known as the "Parable of the Sunfish."

Biography

Reginald Jackson is Professor of Pre-modern Japanese Literature at the University of Michigan. He is the author of 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). Not only a consummate scholar and teacher, Jackson is also an accomplished artist and musician. You can read more about his work at https://www.reginaldjackson.com/