Theatricalities of Power: The Cultural Politics of Noh

Abstract

Through an extended reading of noh play Aoi ne Ue, as well as briefer examinations of several other plays, Theatricalities of Power sheds new light on circulation of power and desire in middle and late medieval periods in Japan. The author argues that, rather than simply mirroring sociopolitical contexts in which they were performed, these plays constituted an active, productive force in theater of medieval cultural imaginary by engaging specific sociopolitical issues and problems. Neither reducing noh to its theatrical conventions nor abstracting its style and poetics from its performativity, book reads noh differently, opening performance text to its historically specific contexts. It aims not merely to recount history of noh, but to investigate history in noh, to explore the indecision as to limit between performance text of noh and its other. The author approaches noh as a site of conflict framed by mechanisms of patronage within which poetic, religious, political, and economic discourses are brought together in complex and innovative ways. He brings to fore micropolitics of culture operative in noh by ferreting out power relations and tensions at play between noh texts and their institutions of support and by opening noh to extradramatic linkages with contemporaneous figurations of authority, change in legal codes, and sexual politics.