Playing Off the Beat: Critique, Untimeliness, and Musical Events in Contemporary Japan

• In Event: Rethinking Regionalism in Japan: Performance, Literature, and Music

Abstract

The redirection of scholarly analysis away from metropole-oriented national narratives and toward voices from the margins is, especially for Area Studies, a project that holds great promise. But this project also always carries with it the risk of devolving into what Harry Harootunian has called a “fetishistic inversion,” a shuffling of the relative positionality of center and periphery that threatens to reveal little more than different modes of belonging within a broader national/state framework, ultimately leaving that framework and its terms unquestioned and intact. There seems, in short, to be a need to enhance our understanding of ‘regionalism’ and its potentialities, in order both to transcend the closed-circuited structure of center and periphery, and to reveal therein the possibility of critiquing and re-envisioning national frameworks and their common-sense claims to ‘History’. The paper proposed herein aims to indulge in a thought experiment, and to add to the discussion on regionalism by introducing the notion of temporal regionalism, which, simply stated, involves the fluid (and sometimes fleeting) affirmation of other histories, conjured within and potentiated by the context of practiced place. Such ‘temporal regions’ may be associated with geographic locale, but ultimately rely upon the citation of different forms of untimeliness for their specificity. These temporal regions often take shape, I suggest, within fixed performative spaces such as concert venues, and this paper will consider the very different ways in which such ‘regions’ seemed to materialize in the context of two separate musical events held in Osaka and Kagoshima in the spring of 2015. The manifestation of ‘temporal regions’ appears to be closely associated to critical stances held by the (trans-regional) actors populating them, and I will suggests that the ambiguous potentiality of these lies not in their distance from the national framework, but, paradoxically, in their (disruptive) proximity to it.

Author

• Scott W. Aalgaard, University of Chicago