Reginald Jackson, Evangelization, Enslavement, and the Racialized Performance of Faith in Jesuit Japan

  • Rockefeller Hall, 374

Following Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the category of “Man” and the massive violence required to fortify it, I investigate the role performance plays in rendering racialized bodies legible as human, virtuous, and worthy of salvation. What rhetorical and physical gestures characterized competing performances of faith and personhood staged between Asia, Europe, and the New World during early modern Jesuit expansion? To answer this question, I consider Jesuit evangelization in Japan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alongside earlier histories of conquest, enslavement, and racial formation within Asia and beyond. Using methods of analysis drawn from literary criticism, performance studies, critical race studies, and queer studies, I map a genealogy of pronouncements, behaviors, desires, and failures that demonstrates the radical contingency saturating the missionary enterprise.