Translating the Other: Lessons from the World of Medieval Japan. Lecture by Professor Rajyashree Pandey

Event time: 
Wednesday, March 17, 2021 - 4:30pm
Event description: 

Zoom information:
https://yale.zoom.us/j/98786508999?pwd=d1lhM0tETForeEpoNUpBa2xXcTlMZz09
Password: 128119

Abstract:

This paper engages with debates within feminism to rethink woman, gender, body, and agency as conceptual categories for reading medieval Japanese literary/Buddhist texts. It questions the unreflexive transposition of contemporary categories of thought that have emerged out of a specifically European history on to worlds that were shaped by very different histories and religious/cultural traditions. The paper argues that in medieval Japanese texts gender did not function as a ‘social’ category posited against the ‘natural’ fact of sex and that gender was instead a kind of script in which the specificity of the gendered performance gave substance to the categories ‘male’ and ‘female.’ It challenges the validity of reading the actions of medieval Japanese women through the prism of either subordination or rebellion, suggesting that such readings are underpinned by modern, liberal, secular conceptions of agency, which fail to acknowledge the importance of non-human interventions in the cosmological/social imaginary of medieval Japan. The final section of the paper considers what it means to read erotic encounters in courtly romances such as the Tale of Genji as coercive sex or rape, highlighting the problem of viewing texts from distant times and places through an intellectual and moral prism that belongs to our contemporary world.

Biography:

Rajyashree Pandey is Professor of Japanese Studies in the Politics department of Goldsmiths, University of London. She received her education in India, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia and has taught in many academic institutions across the world. She is the author of Perfumed Sleeves and Tangled Hair: Body, Woman and Desire in Medieval Japanese Narratives (University of Hawaii Press, 2016) and Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan: The Works of the Poet-Priest Kamo no Chõmei (University of Michigan Press, 1998). She has also published articles in a wide range of journals from Monumenta Nipponica to Postcolonial Studies on medieval Japanese literature and Buddhism, as well as on sexuality and Japanese popular culture.