Publishing the Stage: Print and Performance in Early Modern Japan

Location: University of Colorado, Boulder
Date: March 5 – 6, 2011

The conference is free and open to the public, and it will feature 13 speakers from the U.S., Japan, and the U.K.  Papers will be devoted to exploring the confluence of theater and publishing in seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Japan.  Presenters will seek to examine these vibrant and mutually supporting worlds by considering a variety of performance and bookselling traditions from the perspectives of marketing, manufacturing, and visual and artistic license.  Because of its interdisciplinary nature, the conference should be of interest to scholars in the fields of literary, art historical, and theater studies alike.  Papers will be presented in either English or Japanese, with no translation.  For further information, including a conference schedule, list of panels, and hotel and transportation options, please see our website at http://colorado.edu/cas/publishingthestage.htm .  Or, feel free to contact either Keller Kimbrough or Satoko Shimazaki at keller.kimbrough@colorado.edu and satoko.shimazaki@colorado.edu.

Conference speakers and their paper titles are as follows:

• Drew Gerstle, “Creating Celebrity: Poetry in Osaka Actor Surimono and Prints”
• Robert Goree, “The Virtual Stage: Performance, Geography, and Takizawa Bakin’s Yakusha meisho zue”
• Hioki Atsuko, 「近世期における中将姫説話の展開」 (“Staging Chujohime in the Edo Period”)
• Janice Kanemitsu, “Kinpira Joruri and its Textual Transformations”
• Adam Kern, “Kabuki on Page: The Scopic Regime of Theatrical Comics in Early Modern Japan”
• Keller Kimbrough, “The Truth about ‘True Texts’: Publishing Sekkyo and Ko-joruri in the Seventeenth Century”
• Matsuba Ryoko, 「江戸の役者絵本－大英博物館蔵役者絵本コレクションを中心に－」 (“Edo Yakusha ehon in the British Museum”)
• Katherine Saltzman-Li, “Kabuki Knowledge: Professional Manuscripts and Commercial Texts on the Art of Kabuki”
• Satoko Shimazaki, “Reading Ephemera: Imagining Genji from the Edo Stage”
• Yamashita Noriko (Takahashi Noriko), 「幕末役者見立絵の見立て－『見立三十六歌撰』について－」 (“Late Edo-Period Formulations of Actor Mitate Prints: The Case of Portraits of the Thirty-six Poetic Geniuses”)
• Yamashita Takumi, 「19世紀末欧米出版物の中の歌舞伎」 (“Kabuki in Late Nineteenth-Century European and American Publications”)
• Yano Akiko, “Capturing the Body: Ryukosai’s Notes on ‘Realism’ in Representing Actors on Stage”
• Jonathan Zwicker, “The Moving Image in an Age of Print: Ephemera, Scrapbooks, and the Archives of Early Japanese Cinema”

R. Keller Kimbrough
Associate Professor
Dept. of Asian Languages and Civilizations
279 University of Colorado, Boulder
Boulder, CO  80309-0279
keller.kimbrough@colorado.edu