Tamenori and the “Sinographic Subaltern” of Genji-Era Japan Peasants, Prisoners, and Castaways

About this event

Speaker : Jeffrey Niedermaier, Brown University

Title : Tamenori and the “Sinographic Subaltern” of Genji-Era Japan Peasants, Prisoners, and Castaways

Abstract : Early in Murasaki Shikibu’s Tale of Genji , the titular prince overhears laborers in a down-and-out neighborhood of the Japanese capital grumbling about the cold weather and sluggish economy. Hardly another syllable is uttered in the voices of the capital’s working poor for the rest of the tale. This talk follows up on their complaints by turning away from the kana prose that commands so much of our attention toward the Genji era. Its focus is instead on Murasaki Shikibu’s contemporary, the poet-official Minamoto no Tamenori (d. 1011). Tamenori was an adept provincial governor and a prolific composer of kanshi : poetry in the multilegible Chinese “world-script” that wove elites across prenational East Asia into a network of mutual intelligibility, recognition, and disavowal that is studied today as the “Sinographic Cosmopolis.”

A subset of Tamenori’s sinographic poems registers brushes with those whose labor and suffering sustained court life. These include farmers granted tax relief amid famine; convicts fed by the monarch’s deputies; and a babbling castaway from the island of Ullŭng repatriated by imperial grace. Convention obliges these poems to praise a merciful monarch. Yet they are not so much exercises in dreary mannerism as textual sites where compulsory encomium calls into question who toils and languishes so that a privileged few may eat, drink, and write poetry.

To tease out these tensions, I draw on Marxist and postcolonial theory in order to articulate a “sinographic subaltern”: the downtrodden who are at once represented in and effaced from an elite, cosmopolitan discourse that, in a sense, produces the very subordination it portrays and dissimulates. Tamenori’s castaway, who ostensibly “cannot speak” ( kare wa monoiu koto ni atawazu ), leads the poet to anticipate Gayatri Spivak’s famous question in a sinoxenic context where the relation between speech and writing is anything but straightforward.

The sinographic subaltern, I propose, can serve as a vector for comparative approaches to the Sinographic Cosmopolis that would not confine themselves to East Asian societies’ uppermost strata. At the same time, the unfortunate figures behind Tamenori’s poems harbor latent solidarity with the elite Genji -era women who lived and wrote under what we might dub “sinographic patriarchy”: both groups were imperfectly excluded from sinographic poetics.

About East Asia Program

As Cornell’s hub for research, teaching, and engagement with East Asia, the East Asia Program (EAP) serves as a forum for the interdisciplinary study of historical and contemporary East Asia. The program draws its membership of over 45 core faculty and numerous affiliated faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from eight of Cornell’s 12 schools and colleges.