In this episode, the JSAP team talks with Prof. Vyjayanthi Selinger, whose research focuses on medieval Japanese literature and culture. Vyjayanthi Ratnam Selinger is the Stanley F. Druckenmiller Associate Professor of Asian Studies at Bowdoin College. Born and raised in India, she moved to the United States to pursue doctoral work in Japanese literature and culture. Her research examines literary representations of conflict in medieval Japan, using conflict as the key node to examine war memory, legal and ritual constraints on war, Buddhist mythmaking, and women in war. She is the author of the book Authorizing the Shogunate: Ritual and Material Culture in the Literary Construction of Warrior Order. Prof. Selinger is joined in conversation with JSAP contributors Harrison Watson, Sophie Hasuo, and Prof. Reginald Jackson. Topics of discussion include: South Asian American identities; caste privilege; international faculty at US institutions; applying to graduate school; racist microaggressions; English; colonial and postcolonial understandings of the other; race in Japanese Studies; reparative orientations; forgetting first languages; second language learning; Wuthering Heights; antiracist work; Japanese American students; finding one's voice in writing.
In this episode, the JSAP team talks with Prof. Vyjayanthi Selinger, whose research focuses on medieval Japanese literature and culture. Vyjayanthi Ratnam Selinger is the Stanley F. Druckenmiller Associate Professor of Asian Studies at Bowdoin College. Born and raised in India, she moved to the United States to pursue doctoral work in Japanese literature and culture. Her research examines literary representations of conflict in medieval Japan, using conflict as the key node to examine war memory, legal and ritual constraints on war, Buddhist mythmaking, and women in war. She is the author of the book Authorizing the Shogunate: Ritual and Material Culture in the Literary Construction of Warrior Order. Prof. Selinger is joined in conversation with JSAP contributors Harrison Watson, Sophie Hasuo, and Prof. Reginald Jackson. Topics of discussion include: South Asian American identities; caste privilege; international faculty at US institutions; applying to graduate school; racist microaggressions; English; colonial and postcolonial understandings of the other; race in Japanese Studies; reparative orientations; forgetting first languages; second language learning; Wuthering Heights; antiracist work; Japanese American students; finding one's voice in writing.
To learn more about Professor Selinger’s research, please watch her JSAP webinar, "Challenges and Opportunities in Anti-racist Pedagogy in Premodern Japanese Literature." She is on twitter @jayselinge.
This podcast is created with generous support from the University of Michigan’s Center for Japanese Studies. Recording, editing, and transcription support came from Reginald Jackson, Justin Schell, Sophie Hasuo, Rachel Willis, Harrison Watson, Robin Griffin, and Allison Alexy. Please see the Japanese Studies and Antiracist Pedagogy homepage for more information.
Japanese Studies and Antiracist Pedagogy Podcast Series
Episode Two Transcript: Professor Vyjayanthi Selinger
This transcript has been edited for clarity
Dr. Reginald Jackson:Today we welcome Vyjayanthi Selinger, Associate Professor of Asian Studies at Bowdoin College.
Harrison Watson:Dr. Selinger’s research examines literary representations of conflict in medieval Japan, in particular war memory, Buddhist mythmaking, and women in war. Thank you, Professor Selinger for joining us. We're all really excited to see you here and listen to your story.
Dr. Vyjayanthi Selinger: Thank you for having me.
Harrison: To start off, how do you identify?
Vyjayanthi:I identify in two different ways and I'm still conflicted about that. So I would call myself a South Asian American. But since I'm a somewhat recent immigrant, I naturalized twelve years ago, I also think of myself as an Indian-born scholar of Japanese Studies in the US.
Sophie Hasuo: Thank you for sharing. I can relate with this identity conflict. I think a lot of scholars, especially scholars of color definitely can. So since you have kind of multiple ways of identifying, where do you call home?
Vyjayanthi:So again, I think when I identify myself as an Indian-born scholar, I think of home as New Delhi, where I was born and raised. I was raised between new Delhi and Chennai. But, you know, I came to this country quite intentionally, and I came to seek the opportunities, educational and social and personal that the United States offers. So when I identify as a South Asian American, I think about all that had been made possible for me by my move to this country. I'll also say that part of my vacillation around how to identify is that, to identify straight up as a South Asian American in my mind would be to imply that I had had the very racially embodied experience that people of color have in this country, growing up in this country. Whereas I was born and raised in a country where I was the majority, and I didn't have a similar experience, a very embodied experience in my own country. So my ambivalence in some sense stems from that. I am conscious as I do diversity work at my own institution, I'm very conscious of the fact that though I identify as a person of color, it is very different if you were born in this country than if you were born outside of it.
Reginald:I think on that, on that score, then, Vyjayanthi, thank you for sharing this and let me just say again how happy we are to have you here. Could you talk a little bit about that kind of consciousness that you bring, then, in terms of thinking about the diversity work? I mean, I, you know, we were, I think especially attuned to, I certainly am in various administrative roles that I now occupy and, you know, I mean, I think throughout my career, as an academic, being, I think on the one hand, happy to try to support marginalized students, especially, on the one hand, but also I think particularly, I think in the wake of, of the events of last summer with Black Lives Matter protests, especially, you know, also being let's say more than a bit skeptical of the institutions, various institutions, I think, rushed to express support in ways that seem often kind of cynical, or at least at odds with how things are on the ground or what they do in practice as opposed to what they profess in these moments of, where it becomes more fashionable to express support, you know? And so I think obviously that varies according to the size of the institution and the kind of character of the institution. But I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, that kind of work, like what that feels like right now, and even how that's changed. I know, you know, from our own personal conversations that you've been doing this work for a long time, but the kind of stakes in some ways seem much higher. I mean, and to say nothing of the events of the shootings in Atlanta last week, as well, right? If you could talk about that. I mean, I, I think maybe circle back around to what it means to think about, like what diversity means, say a South Asian context, for instance, and your own kind of positionality in that context, that'd be great to hear.
Vyjayanthi:One of the things I often think about is about my caste. So I am an upper caste individual from India and what this means. And, you know, caste doesn't figure in our conversations of diversity in America, you know, it gets flattened into sort of “people of color” or “South Asian American.” There are all kinds of South Asian Americans and they've had different varied embodied experiences, even back in India. So I have this enormous unearned privilege of A, having been part of the Hindu majority in my country and B, having been part of upper caste. It assured all kinds of opportunities that others didn't get to enjoy. Caste ensured that both my parents were college educated and the benefits that come from that. So I think about that a lot. To respond to Reggie’s question about the work I do on my own campus around issues of diversity, to be mindful of, you know, different experiences of racial, ethnic, and caste embodiment that people bring to their experiences. So to not assume that my experience as a person of color in America is in any way similar to another's, whether they're coming from another country or they were raised in this country. To be mindful that it, that each of each of us comes with certain privileges to the conversation and to really hear where others are coming from, the kinds of roadblocks they have faced and how they have experienced trivialization. One of the, one of the things I never faced growing up because of the privilege, the unearned privilege of my caste is I was never trivialized. But if you are growing up in this country, or if you were growing up in India and you're a member of another caste you have faced it, and that has informed your worldview and your sense of place in the world.
Reginald: Thank you for explaining that. And I think that one of the valuable things about having you specifically and someone of your background who's also so thoughtful about these things here, I think is, is that folks can get a sense of all the different layers. I think, I mean, we talk about intersectional feminism, for instance, and thinking about race and class and gender and ethnicity and national origin and so forth. I think even though Isabel Wilkerson's, you know, recent book has kind of put caste in the minds of, I think, you know, most kind of Anglophone readers, at least in the States more recently. I'm also struck by what you're describing because I’ve had some conversations with colleagues here, I mean, particularly those, let's say Black feminist scholars who are working, been working on race for a long time, and who've been, I think understandably pretty critical of Wilkerson's book along these lines, partially because in some ways it it, it assumes or operates from this premise, you know, of, of race being somehow insufficient to talk about in this kind of situation. And at the same time that there is, I think those of us who were most skeptical of this turn towards thinking about caste in, in I think a pretty, you know, to say nothing of what it does to bypass decades of work by South Asian scholars, into issue, right? It kind of subsumes it under this US-based kind of often myopic black-white kind of binaristic rhetoric at this moment where there's a lot of folks who are all too happy to kind of scoot past questions of race and white supremacy. One of the things that's really helpful about what you're saying is that to kind of think about the complexity of these issues and how, you're not saying it quite this way, but one way to understand it is that within this kind of corporate multiculturalism that the university often, you know, participates in and even fetishizes, that a lot of these distinctions or fine-grained inflections get kind of flattened out. And so the part of the work that you're trying to do is to remain mindful of these in ways that actually might be able to address some of these, these things. Yeah.
Vyjayanthi: And I think you said it much better than I did, because I think one of, at least at my institution, I noticed that faculty of color are in fact international representation. At least in my institution, over 50% of faculty of color are foreign-born. And that says something about how the US higher education landscape attracted and drew a generation of people from abroad. And it's still drawing a generation of people from abroad while there are also American-born BIPOC faculty who are also coming up through the ranks. And that, I really think that those of us who are foreign-born, where we enjoyed extraordinary privilege by being the majority in our countries, ought to really pay heed to our colleagues who grew up here and had a very different sense of racial embodiment growing up here.
Harrison: Just listening to you speak earlier you mentioned that you like to try and hear where people are coming from. That really struck me because, you know, at least in the American context, I assume it it's somewhat analogous for your context, there's not really an incentive to listen to people if you come from a position of privilege. So I was wondering how you came across that, I guess that learned skill, in some ways of listening to people and really trying to hear them in an authentic way.
Vyjayanthi: It's such a tough question. I wish I could take credit for it, but I think there are a lot of people before me who have modeled it for me. One of them is currently our Dean of Faculty Development and Multicultural Affairs, who really modeled that kind of, you know, if we stop making this about ourselves and we make it about others, what picture of the world do we see. And not to flatten those differences, right? To really understand those differences in a kind of very textured way. I mean, we can get into that. I think international faculty face certain kinds of challenges in America. But they also come with certain kinds of benefits from their own countries.
As a segue into that, I wanted to say that part of the journey that brought me here was that I grew up in India. I was studying Japanese as an undergrad, and then I got a Japanese government scholarship to go to Japan for a year to really immerse myself in Japanese language learning. But there I met these two American friends. I was twenty, twenty-one years old. And at the end of the year they went back to America and I went back to India. But they then Fedexed me the application to American graduate school, to in particular Harvard and said, “we spent thirty-five dollars Fedexing this to you. You better apply.” So in some sense, these two friends of mine had more faith in my ability to make the leap than I did on my own. And I was like, but, well you spent thirty-five dollars, you're asking me to spend eighty to apply. Like after I take TOEFL and everything, it's going to be so much more. But, you know, I did apply. And then Harvard rejected me outright saying, you have to have a Master's degree in India before we can accept you for a Master's in America. And so I thought that was a very arbitrary cutoff. And so I appealed, I said, okay, you know, I’m not asking you to admit me, but I’m just asking you to consider me. And I said, you know, yes, it's true, an Indian undergraduate is only three years, but I did three years in India and then had an additional year in Japan, so that makes it the equivalent of an American four-year degree. And so I’m grateful that I appealed and then Harvard actually considered my application. It was one of those turning points in my life that I could not have predicted.
Reginald: Can I just ask just a quick follow-up on that, because you kind of dropped that anecdote in.
Vyjayanthi: I know, I wasn't sure where I was going with it.
Reginald: No, no, no, that's fine. I think it's, it's amazing. One of the things that's so great about this opportunity to ask people about their stories is that there's stories within stories, within stories, within stories, right? I can't help but see this, given what you were just saying about the kind of upper caste privilege. Like, I love the fact that you're saying, Harvard, clearly you have me confused with someone else, because I'm going to tell you that – To have the, I don't know what we call it, you know, moxie, if you're, if you're, if you're, the wherewithal the kind of self-possession to say, you know, Harvard, clearly you don't know what you're talking about and you need to reconsider this decision, I think is just bad ass, first of all. But I don't imagine, you know, you know, a Dalit student necessarily saying, you know what, I think this is the time to tell, you know, this kind of renowned, world renowned university that, you know, do you know what I mean?
And I'm so glad that you're in the field, I mean, for all kinds of reasons, I mean, and, and the field needs you. And, but like to just this think about that really interesting intersection that, that, like, there's something about just your faith, you're calling it unearned privilege, but also, you know, sense of your own, you know, the arbitrariness of this. And I, and I'm saying this partially because it is quite arbitrary and there are kind of these arcane rules that no one outside of the system, you know, I learn more of them every day, right? You never see how the sausage is made. And so like their logic of admission or denial is in many ways is quite arbitrary. So the fact that you called them on that in a way that was compelling, I think is really fascinating. And that you wouldn't be here talking with us about, about these things had you, had you taken no for an answer. I just think that that's worth, particularly now that we're seeing in various administrations, but, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, Jared Kushner, for those of us that don't have $5 million to, you know, parents that can just kind of drop this, drop this money to kind of grease the wheels, right, despite being, you know, mediocre and completely unqualified, right? I think that, that on the other side, to know that these stories exist, you know, for someone like you to do this, I think is really important for folks of any background to be able to hear. So I just wanted to flag that.
Vyjayanthi: Actually to develop what you sort of threw in there. It's absolutely about, you know, the unearned privilege of sort of feeling like I belong or I ought to belong, that, you know, the doors should open for me. But, you know, as I hear for more and more international faculty, you hear about their own stories of gatekeeping at US institutions. We long stories of advisors not believing that we could write our dissertations in English. My own, one of my own dissertation advisors, you know, refused to accept my dissertation, until it had been professionally edited by a native speaker. So, I mean, it was one of those moments, and I think I fellow international faculty, share this, this feeling of perplexity about, you know if we're writing the dissertation, we are able to write in this language. This default assumption that we don't have full possession of English. It's a kind of common refrain among international-born faculty. So yes, I, I started my tenure track job in debt because–you know, I don't have parents who can necessarily fund this for me–$3,000 in debt having paid a native speaker to edit my dissertation, because that was the hoop I needed to jump through, and plenty of fellow international scholars share that.
Sophie: Thank you very much for being so candid, especially about your experiences once you kind of became an international faculty and you, I feel like vacillated between this majority or minority existence. You mentioned before that you went to Japan, I believe for a year, and then eventually obviously came to the United States. So I'm interested to hear about, I guess, first, how you perceived Japan and perhaps the US when you were growing up, and then once you entered these spaces and became more of a minority, how you navigated that tension, and then eventually, how you currently navigate this, like, immigrant existence as an international faculty.
Vyjayanthi: So again, I had a privileged and somewhat unusual childhood. My mother was a homemaker, but my father was a retail banker, you know, just local branch. So not investment banker, retail banker. It was one of those unusual twists in fate that my father was selected when I was in fourth grade, I believe. So every three years of my life I have moved. For retail banking, my father worked for the State Bank of India. We moved every three years. So one of these random three-year moves was to Tokyo. So in fourth grade, I found myself in Tokyo, from fourth grade to seventh grade I found myself in Tokyo. The State Bank of India paid for the International School of Education, but we weren't necessarily of the international school “set.” You know, we weren't the wealthy step that typically sends people to international schools. So there was a yawning class difference. So I landed there. Of course my accent in English was immediately dismissed as not being standard English. I was put in ESL classes, you know, there was that. Because it's so hard to disentangle if it was race or if it was class, but I didn't have a single, I actually only had one friend for those three years of a German girl, befriended me. And one only needs one friend, one doesn’t need more.
But yeah, so it was a terribly lonely time for my family. My brother faced similar, racial discrimination in school. And I have a scar on my face from these, these kids would say, “Ugh, I don't want to touch her. She smells gross. She's icky.” So there was like a lot of bullying around me being stinky or whatever. Like, ooh, I touched her, I've got to wash my hands kind of stuff, right? So I'm really grateful for that one friend through that, you know, strange period in my life. So one of the accidents, again, this is, a story of, in some sense, a story of privilege that my father's job catapulted me into Tokyo, and I didn't speak it at school either, but there's a way in which Japanese sort of sponged itself into my head. It's surprising to me that in college when I decided it was time to declare a major, I had vowed to never to go back to Japan. And since most of my bullies were American, I had vowed that I would never go to America. So that was a, you know, twelve year old me saying there's no way, but an eighteen year old me was like, okay, I'm going to revisit this.
As I said, I grew up as part of the majority in India, except for those three years in Japan, which formed a unique moment in my life that gave me the benefits I have now that when I started learning Japanese, it wasn't a hundred percent foreign language. It was a eighty percent foreign language to me. I had a easier threshold of entry into it.
But to add on to that, to say that graduate school was, you know, there have been people who have doubted my abilities. But I was also privileged, really, to have three people, you know, in my graduate career who nurtured me, right? And I think it's so critical. So the first in the Master's program was Edwin Cranston. He's a scholar from a previous generation, that generation that worked in Japan right after occupation and became, that became that first generation of white men who became leaders of the field. So he, and then after him, my PhD advisor, Karen Brazell, and after her a scholar in Japan by the name of Matsuo Ashie. I am grateful for them for that what I will call the elastic way in which they regarded scholarship, which actually opened up space for me to pursue scholarship any way I saw fit. They each had their ideas of close reading that as long as I was close reading, I felt the field, and Reggie and I can talk about this, the field has a way of shutting down various lines of inquiry. But these three individuals really gave me the freedom to pursue various kinds of lines of inquiry through my scholarship.
Reginald: Thank you for sharing that. I was hoping that you would mention you don't have to mention the friends that spent thirty five dollars on you so you could spend, you know, hundreds and then thousands of dollars, later on. But I did want to, I think that is important to just kind of affirm that, that kind of support and that mentorship. you know, I think that in all kinds of ways we have these folks that we serendipitously, I think often kind of encounter. And, you know, sometimes it's folks who, for various reasons, have had their own experiences, hardships and recognize in us in different ways.
I wanted to, to maybe follow up on Sophie's question partially to, again, just notice a connection between those terrible kids that you were dealing with in Japan, you're saying, you know, American kids, and then this scholar who's impoverishing you because of their unwillingness. And, you know, whether we think of that aas racist or not, with this bar, which in some ways is, it's not about rigor. It's kind of this kind of discriminatory impulse that's masquerading as rigor or masquerading as a kind of policing of standards. And I think that's often how it happens, particularly in the context of Japanese Studies. Maybe it's any discipline, but I'm thinking about particularly in kind of pre-modern Japanese studies often surround, you know, linguistic rigor, which I think is obviously important, but that can also, I think, hide a certain kind of, let's just, lack of imagination to say nothing of kind of deep positivism and conservatism, conservatism. That's actually part and parcel of, of this pretty territorial stake in, in shutting things down or totalizing these kinds of questions, as opposed to opening things up in the way that you've mentioned these other folks did. And so, I think about, you know, Karen Brazell’s scholarship in particular, and I didn't know her, but still have immense respect for her intellect and her generosity. I mean, you can read that. And I mean, if you're paying attention, you can see that in what she's doing. And, you know, I'm still a huge fan as somebody who works on Noh for all of her work with Monica Bethe, who was one of my teachers in Japan actually, and had that kind of, I don't want, I want to say just kind of, just a broader sense of how these forms worked in the world, as opposed to just in the academy. And I think that that kind of perspective is really important.
Speaking of German lineages, but I think about her and that, like her father, you know is Hans Bethe, working on the Manhattan project and then Monica being in some ways, right, it's not penance, right, but, but kind of you know, fascinated with Japan and really committed to Japan and, and kind of in this humanistic way that's so on the other side of the world, in some ways, from the kind of work that her father was doing. And those kinds of legacies, those kinds of stories that underpin, you know, I think sometimes folks’ willingness to move in different ways, or to be more open, I think is really, is really great. I mean, as you've mentioned, it's really necessary in some ways to allow folks like you know you to, to grow and to develop.
Vyjayanthi: To pick up on what you were saying to sort of think about our field and the way in which race operates in the field. You know I'm still developing thoughts on it. But to me, there's a particular colonial understanding of the other that operates in our field, where Japan is an object of study and not a subject that we converse with. And there are ways in which the kinds of policing in our field operate to redraw those boundaries in sometimes these very colonizing ways, and sometimes in mutually productive ways. You know, stay in your own lane kind of thing. But there are ways in which that mutual gaze operates in Japanese and white subject sort of way. And so I think people like Reggie, people like me, and, you know, the new generation of China-born scholars who are now coming into our field are really going to complicate that move. The day before yesterday in The Chronicle, there was an article, you know, developing the idea of paranoid reading versus reparative reading. I've spoken to Reggie about this before. I think that people like me, Reggie and other scholars are trying to push back against the limits imposed by paranoid reading by opening up. So it is not about what the text, I mean, it can be about what the text says, but I think, you know, many of us are interested in the potentials of reading, the ways in which a text can open up ways of reading and understanding the world. And not itself about the content.
Decolonization requires understanding that racial dynamic that is involved in fixing the other within a certain content boundary, and using more reparative readings to open up possibilities. So I think my favorite line from The Chronicle a couple of days ago was “who reads, I mean, who really reads D.A. Mill’s, The Novel and the Policeto see if he was right?” right? And I think too often, our field is invested in, are you right about this fixed content of the other that we are, you know, we have in our minds. And ought to be more about what are the potentials of reading that texts open up, that are not about the fixed and circumscribed object of study.
Reginald: Yeah, just one quick follow-up. This is obviously one part of a much longer kind of more ramified conversation, but, but, you know, I appreciate your attention to that and this question of reading. I was thinking too, in terms of thinking about the work of we're trying to do with this, this antiracist pedagogy project more broadly, in some ways, is actually to take seriously that process of reading. But reading, you know, at a macro and a micro level. Which is to say that at the level of the field, and to think about some of these things. I mean, these things that we tend to only get in this kind of oral history or this anecdotal way about, like, your experience, like what it means. That policing of admission on the one hand. But then also of, you know, English, English language, you know as this kind of barrier to some kind of competency with the sheet of paper.
Maybe not the time or place to do it exactly, but there's an area studies critique version of this that I think is really important at the same time that I think it's kind of, you know, I think it's receded, understandably, as the prominence of the field itself of Japanese Studies more broadly has receded in some ways. But I wonder a little bit about what the relationship might be between, say, a more reparative orientation to reading, but then also to, then, questions of mentoring, questions of remaking or re-imagining the field. I mean, you mentioned really helpfully in terms of China-born scholars especially now. I'm just noticing, too, lots of, of BIPOC students, lots of queer students, I mean there’s always been, you know, particularly for gay white men in the field of Japanese Studies, especially, there's been a kind of disproportionate, I think, representation in that regard. But to think about what it means now for students for various reasons, I think for better or worse, I think are interested in Japan, you know, partially as a kind of safe space. I mean, I'm interested to hear you talk about this, you know, it was for your father's job effectively, that that's how you kind of encountered Japan in this, this way, and how great it is in some ways that you realize that Americans were being trash, you know, to you, because of race, because of class in some ways. So that kind of skepticism was built in. Whereas I think that there are students here who also, I mean, I'm noticing now, particularly in the context of COVID who’ve grown up with Japanese culture in a way that, it's a different kind of escapist fantasy than that, of the folks, you know, the kind of first, second generation of folks who were trying to, you know, find this kind of riskless, you know, comfortable place where they could kind of expand their subjectivity, not unlike the US itself in these imperialistic ways. But also, I think closeted or not, trying to figure things out and seeing that now I think is really interesting in terms of what it might allow, as opposed to the folks that just want to, say, dominate the other. That feels a little different nowadays with students.
Vyjayanthi: Yeah, I do see students who take Japanese, it is, it is a kind of homing device, right? So with a language that operates as a kind of homing device where you see. Well, first of all, I mean, Japanese classes at Bowdoin are majority BIPOC. So that's a huge change from the eighties or nineties, right? And sometimes it's anime, and sometimes it's the sort of the communities, the more welcoming communities you found in high school through anime that you felt accepted, that sort of, you know, drive this interest in Japanese. And I'm also conscious of the fact that, you know, on campus to take a nonwhite language registers differently than taking French. So the multiple dynamics at play when students take Japanese.
And then when someone, I teach Japanese language, and then when someone like me gets up before them, and I'm not a native speaker, we have conversations about how, you know, through graduate school, the assumption was that you needed to be a native speaker to teach the language, or at least teach it well. We have conversations about how, you know, that's a kind of essentialization. Like who owns a language is a kind of essentialization. My whole life, I would have wanted to punch people who have said to me that I don't own English. So like, yes, I do, it is my first language and anyone who says differently, you know, let's talk about it. And that it's, there is, it rests on certain assumptions of a certain ethnicity owning a language. And that, you know, we have sort of conversations about, about that. Does anyone actually own a language? Isn't, isn't everyone in a fluid relationship with it? Like any language that you don't speak, you lose it. Like, I am theoretically a native speaker of Tamil, my mother tongue, but I don't use it. In what way do I own it? So we have these conversations about what does it mean to learn a language in ways that are conscious of not essentializing who it is that owns a language. And likewise, through understanding culture. Like what are the ways in which the investments in seeing Japan as traditional? What are the investments in seeing Japan as a somehow traditional country? What are the investments in seeing it as a kind of placeless super flat country, right? So we talk about these things at language table, Japanese language table.
Harrison: So I was supposed to follow up with another question, but I'm just so intrigued by everything you just said, and you just reminded me of a couple of things. My mother being a native Spanish speaker. And then now she like, reads, you know, Harry Potterbooks in Spanish, just to sort of keep that alive within her, which is just really interesting to see her go through that process and try to negotiate that. I, myself don't speak Spanish, and so that becomes sort of a way in which I can't, you know, I wish I could help her in that way. But regardless that's sort of my janky way of coming back around to reading. And just sort of ask you, what were you reading during, you know, high school, college period, and what languages were you reading in? Where were you getting your books from and how did that influence your trajectory into Japanese Studies?
Vyjayanthi: Thank you for that question. And thank you for sharing that comment about your mother and yourself. Because I think we all have our own complicated relationships with all our languages. And in my ideal world, you know, we would conduct a thought experiment in which we were all a little foreign from the language, you know, we learned. But, you know, sometimes my own native tongue seems like a foreign country to me. [laughs] And part of the reason, to segueinto your question, is because of British colonization in India and how that meant that a good education necessarily meant an English education. India notionally has a three language policy. That is until eighth grade, you're supposed to be educated in three languages. My primary language was English. My secondary language was Hindi and my tertiary language was Tamil. So you can see my own native tongue kind of got bumped to the bottom. So, given that I was educated in English and, you know, we can speak to the caste and class privileges that allow for that, my high school reading was very much in English. I read some in Hindi, but mostly in English. I went to what's the equivalent of a parochial school, so we didn't have a library on premises. So I read anything that I could get my hands on and whatever was getting passed down, you know, networks of friends. But what was getting passed down on networks of friends was often the Brontes, Thomas Hardy and things like that as well as, you know, pulp fiction, whatever, right? Whatever was getting passed down, my circle of friends is what I was reading.
But in an interesting way, so one of my favorite novels in high school was Wuthering Heights. And I think I just really loved, you know, it appealed to a high school melodramatic self that Catherine was so melodramatic. But in an interesting way, Wuthering Heightswas, in my later scholarship. So this is like the weird ways in which you know, things you read, come back to the surface. So, you know, twenty-five years later, I'm writing about a famine in medieval Japan. So my question was, why is the text unable to talk about a crippling famine? Like, what is it, is it trying to preserve? Whose authority is the text trying to preserve by pushing a crippling famine to the sidelines and making it kind of unmentionable? And then, you know, I had this Wuthering Heightsmoment where I was like, wait, that novel took place in the Irish potato famine. Wait, that novel also buried the fact of a famine. And so, you know, twenty-five years after the fact, I didn't notice it. It was at the fringes of my consciousness, and here it's coming back as you know, perhaps. Like now when I reread it, twenty-five years later, I was like, it is the defining thread, like the, the thread that needs to be suppressed for the novel to make sense, and kudos to Terry Eagleton for pointing that out.
Sophie: I'm also really fascinated by your discussion of your own Japanese language learning as well as how you continue to transform Japanese language pedagogy, just yourself, teaching in the body that you inhabit, as well as the topics that you choose to discuss at these Japanese language tables. I was really struck by that in particular, because I remember, while I was learning Japanese in my undergrad, I would go to, like, lunch talking tables and discussion tables. And we would only talk about the food or our favorite color, or how many classes we had left that day, very basic things, no matter what language level we were currently taking. And it was very diluted and we weren't able to discuss, like, the dynamics of language learning. So I'm wondering if you could speak more about how you think that we can transform Japanese language pedagogy so that we can facilitate conversations of around anti-racism and around larger issues that we all face through this mode. I would really appreciate it.
Vyjayanthi: I do it in my very modest ways. There are other locations in which I think I do that sort of antiracist work with a bigger footprint. But within language class, and thank you for sharing your experience at language tables. You know, as I said earlier, I'm acutely conscious of the fact, and as Harrison also shared about his mother, that sometimes your mother tongue is quite a distant language for you. And so if there are Japanese American students in my class, I actually make it a point to pull them aside and say, I am not at all assuming that you have any privileged access to this knowledge. I think you should divest yourself of that pressure because I certainly don't feel it. If you're here to learn, you know, you are welcome on the same terms as anyone else. I do not have a native speaker, look at me I don't have a native speaker frame to understanding this. You may have heard it at home. You may not have heard it at home. It may have given you some knowledge of the language. It may not. I just don't know. And so we're just going to assume you know, you're learning it with the same sincere desire as anybody else. Because I do think sometimes our Japanese American students feel this pressure of being more present with the language or the culture than they are. So to sort of open up that space of distance I've often found is very productive. And that distance serves all of us, right?
So what are some other ways? So I often tell them that I'm very skeptical of the word “culture.” Just that word has a wave essentializing and flattening complexity, and that I'm willing to entertain conversations around specifically theatrical culture or food culture, and we can get into it. But the word “culture” itself, we will sort of interrogate. And I sometimes offer myself up saying, if you were to say, I hail from Indian culture, I'd say, but what do you mean by that? You know, I hail from a very tiny slice of the Indian experience. The super tiny, extremely privileged slice of the Indian experience. And so it has that way of flattening all the ways in which we interact with the world.
Let's see, what are some of the other ways. I mean, so when we do speeches or essays or, I ask them to use, you know, even in second year Japanese, they're able to express with some complexity, to not necessarily do a research paper on, this is what I researched about, let's say, Akihabara, right and I'm presenting on it. To use the space to think about why did I want to research this? What are the cultural assumptions I'm bringing into it? And how does the object that I'm studying itself challenge the cultural assumptions? That if I paid enough attention to it, it doesn't look like a circumscribed thing. It looks like a blob and a constantly changing blob the more I interrogate my relationship with this. So it's really fun when students start thinking about why is it, why did I want to talk about Akihabara, you know. What's in it for me?
Reginald: Thank you for that. I think, we all want to take your Japanese classes now. And recognized how, with all due respect to all of my amazing teachers throughout the years, how impoverished we’ve been. I think, building on Sophie’s point and Harrison made a similar one, just kind of hearing you talk about how deliberate you are in opposing these kinds of simple notions. First of all, that that can be done pretty early on. There's no reason that one can't start doing that kind of work in a first or second year Japanese class. I think often the idea is that, you know, somehow when you get to the Inter-university program in Yokohama, or in fourth year is when we can start talking about politics or something like that. To say nothing of the politics of knowledge or learning. And by which point, it might be, might be too late. Like, you know, if you've spent these past years talking about kimono and natto, then what do you have left?
And that's a caricature so I don't want to, I don't want to be too flip about that. But I think that what you're pointing out which is really useful is that, there is this way in which a notion of Japanese culture that students are often, you know, ideally being taught to question in say a so-called “content course,” which we realize is a problematic term, is actually being undermined all the time by the language courses, generally speaking. I think in most places, because like the idea is that this object, like the objectification of Japanese culture is so fundamental to a notion of having not the amorphous blob. Try putting that in your course description, right? No Naruto, but we have this amorphous blob that you can learn about, which is masquerading as a fixed stable entity known as Japanese culture.
But like, as, as a result that there is this kind of investment, you know, so the very fact that you said, I wrote this down, right, when you're talking to Japanese American students and saying, you should divest yourself of the pressure, right? That kind of racialized, ethnicized pressure that's coming from places that they can't even name. Maybe it's coming from their parents. Like, you know, you should be more Japanese, which is why you need to take Japanese if you're going to get this tuition money. Or other students, who are in another context, so anxious about doing well, that they are looking to, you know, this phenotypically Japanesey person as the standard that they need to kind of either compare themselves to, or do better than, right? Or ask for help, you know, from, et cetera and all these different things.
And so just how transformative I would imagine that could be for a student to have you in your inimitable way, take them aside and say, you know, this stuff doesn't have to drag you down and you're free to, you know, rise or fall with the difficulty of the material and be helped just like anyone else. And they don't have to have that anxiety. I never thought about that. And so I'm just really grateful for you for flagging that, because I'm sure that there's a collective sigh of release and not just from our Japanese American, you know, co-host, but from folks from folks, you know, all over, I think who are, who are really in a similar boat.
Maybe it's less so now, but I certainly remember, I started taking Japanese in high school. And in college too, there is a way in which it happened, but there are types, right? There's genre of folks. And there's the language nerd. It's not always white, straight male folks. For whom I think everybody wants to do well, ideally, but where it becomes a mission that can be really alienating if for you, it's not - you're a serious student and you're trying to do well, but there, where it's, it's clearly about something else for folks. And it, and it does kind of rely on that same kind of behavior that I think we're lamenting within the field of Japanese Studies, maybe more broadly, but certainly pre-modern. That kind of language like linguistic domination kind of philosophy that I'm going to kind of master this. The presumption of mastery, first of all, where does that come from? And then like how that plays out in a classroom, I think. I've tried to move away from that myself in not, not as a way to be less skilled. But I think that sometimes teachers don't understand that there might be other folks in class, women, queer folks, folks of other races who, it's not that they're underperforming seemingly because they don't care. But because the atmosphere is toxic because the sense of competition that's there in ways that they don't even identify are just aren't, aren't okay with that. They realize that is supremacist, in some ways even, right?
Vyjayanthi: I have to give my students credit that when they do engage with these essays and they perform them as a speech, they are in fact teaching each other through each of their reflections to why I focused on this and having asked these questions. So like, you know, there's the preamble of why I focused on it and then the object as they studied it, and then a reflection on having studied in this way, how would I study it differently by asking these questions? So they do a lot of the work of teaching each other. And, you know, back to the sort of Japanese American students, that one of the things I also tell them is that if you can step back and say, I’m just, I don't own this language, I'm not expected to own this language, you then allow for everyone else to have co-ownership of this language. It's an inherently inclusive move.
Reginald: Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I mean, I love how with each answer, you prove how increasingly awesome you are. So on the one hand, absolutely. I want to, you know, acknowledge your students too. But you're modeling that inclusivity for them. Giving them permission to question the premise of education more broadly.
Vyjayanthi: You’re too kind.
Reginald: I'm just relating the facts of what you've just explained. Like you've just said that what you tell them, you know, in some ways is that, you know, I am standing here in front of you as your teacher, and yet I expect you to teach me things. And you're not doing that in a cynical or performative way. This isn't like the Hollywood version of, you know, or what we sometimes read in these teaching philosophy statements, you know. A kind of boilerplate version you're actually enacting that on a daily basis in these classrooms. And that's why they’re I think, regardless of whatever kind of academic or intellectual talents they have, right, or whatever hustle they have.It's actually because you've created a space pedagogically where they can embrace that and take you seriously and then therefore offer sincerely in this way. And I think that that's exceeding, I know, I'm positive, having done language reviews, having been in many in a Japanese class, having observed classes, having, you know, heard stories from students and colleagues, that's exceedingly rare.
And so I just want to commend you for that, because I think that, building again on Sophie's question that, one of the things we're trying to think about in terms of antiracist pedagogy is that it doesn't have to be, I mean, often is, and I think that's part of it, just kind of talking about race and racism. I mean, there's, there's a way to do that really poorly, first of all, and we see that in, I think most, much, much news and much kind of, you know, mainstream discussion. But it's also about just like humanizing and these kind of gestures, whether they're explicitly pedagogical or not, and opening up spaces for people to be able to be their full selves and not to feel shame or guilt about those things. So that, that learning can happen at a deeper level, and, and not just be about say, content or memorizing kanji, which is important. But it's also about feeling entitled in some ways, to question the nature of education itself, which I think is, goes back to this notion of decolonizing the academy or decolonizing learning more broadly. So I just wanted to, it's a love fest here, but I wanted to just, you know, not undersell the work that you're doing in these, in these, in these ways that it related to the technical things of like, you know, how you're teaching certain grammar points on the one hand, but also just the philosophy that, that really fuels what you're doing. So I'll hush now and let Harrison and Sophie do their thing.
Harrison:Yeah. I really love this discussion that we're having about these concrete changes that we can make in a way that we teach in the discipline and teach language to really improve things. So that leads nicely into our next question of what excites you about Japanese Studies moving forward, you know. What gets you motivated and really excited to continue doing your work?
Vyjayanthi: One of the recent moves in sort of decolonizing our discipline that I'm really excited about is Wendy Matsumura and Sachi Schmidt-Hori. One of their intuitions is that Japan remains an object of knowledge and we remain the knowing subject and we each stay in our own lanes. One of the ways in which this operates to the benefit of Anglo-American scholars is that the assumption is that people in Japan won't be reading it. To the extent that you're not imagining someone in Japan as your audience, they can get relegated to a footnote as opposed to being that other person you're conversing with, right? And that this kind of linguistic separation leads, you know, to all kinds of scholarly blindness but has a way of reinforcing a hierarchy of Anglo-American scholars as the knowers and Japanese scholarship as just dismissed as a kind of just knowledge. One is flat as knowledge and the other is constructed as a knower, as a kind of active subject. And so I'm just really excited about Wendy Matsumura and Sachi Schmidt, because they are seeking funding for and compiling a bilingual journal issue where scholars do. They’re pairing scholars who maybe aren't talking to each other, but could talk to each other and hear, like imagine the other as the audience through the act of translation that I think really will in the long term have some impact towards changing that hierarchy to see it as equal participants in a conversation.
Sophie: I appreciate you identifying this tension within Japanese Studies of object and subject and knower and “knowee,” I suppose. You mentioned before that you found, perhaps maybe in the beginning of your studies, that there was a resistance to expanding the field and expanding lines of inquiry within Japanese Studies. And through these experiences that you've had, you've contributed to being able to expand the area and engage in these more complicated conversations, which I really appreciate. So I'm wondering since we're kind of using this space as well to re-imagine what Japanese Studies can be, how it can be more inclusive, what tendencies would you say that rising scholars should avoid in the academy? And what would make Japanese Studies better?
Vyjayanthi: Really great question. So I'm going to go back to something I said earlier about allowing for more reparative and inventive ways of reading. I mean, as scholars of various diverse viewpoints, as it relates to disability, as it relates to sexuality, as it relates to ethnicity, as they come into the field, I would really like our field to open up, not just to, so I think there are ways in which positivism, a sort of like this is our knowledge of a period closed down conversations. Because it's so easy to exclude. I know, let's take an example of, you know, texts of this period don't talk that much about disability. So, you know, that is not a productive line of inquiry. So, you know, there are ways in which just relying on "what do texts of this period speak of" can shut down lines of inquiry. And I think the more we make space for more inventive readings that not only look at what the texts of this period speak of, but perhaps what they don't speak of, to sort of extend beyond the lines of what is there in the archive for us to tap. I personally look forward to more kinds of scholarship in that vein that, you know, by their very questioning about the limits of what is known, change the conversation about ways of knowing and what kinds of ways of knowing we can bring into the field.
Reginald: Thank you for that. And this kind of takes us more into, into the weeds in a fun way, for me, at least. I appreciate you mentioning the move, you know, it's philosophical, it's political, it's ethical, right, to think, uh, less in terms of the kind of content model and all of the different kinds of things that emerge from that presumption. I mean, you're partially talking about, you know, what kind of epistemological baggage we have.
Vyjayanthi: Positivism is a big one, yes.
Reginald: Exactly. And what that does in terms of our teaching, in terms of our scholarship, and how to maybe kind of move away from that. And I was thinking just more specifically, insofar as you're kind of grappling with these. You say you're kind of trying to figure these things out, and I see that in your scholarship, as well. I think, kind of these ways in which, now that I know that Wuthering Heightsis like this urtext for, for you like I'm going to kind of go back and reread and say like, where -
Vyjayanthi: Where’s the famine?
Reginald: Where's the, famine, first of all. What famines are being suppressed? But then also, you know, what other melodramatic, you know, kind of semi-gothic sensibilities is jJayanthi kind of playing out in this work on Heike or work on, you know, on Noh, or legal systems and so forth. Or on blood, for that matter. Like, you know, she's like, what's missing here? It's like it's famine and it's blood and why, right?
I wanted to ask though, you've shouted out some work that you're interested in, I think for the field. Can you talk a little bit, I'll give a slightly more pointed version of Sophie's question. We're talking about, I think it's important to understand the imperialist white supremacist racist underpinnings of the discipline, right, or of the field more broadly. And then how that plays out in individual disciplines is also really important. That's a longer conversation, but could you talk a little bit about like, what it means for you personally in your work to try to move past some of these things. Or what kind of work you’re really inspired by or drawing from, and either challenges you've had in trying to do this. Because part of what you're suggesting is that there is resistance and we can see that in different places, particularly when one is submitting articles for publication and the editor, God bless them, you know, sends it to someone who is in your subfield, but who is actually really hostile to the very premise of the questions you're asking. And they're saying, "oh, well, you know, she's working on the 15th century and this person works on the 15th century," you know, not realizing, speaking of close reading or reparative reading, like to read the scholar’s scholarship in such a way to know that they philosophically, politically are going to be completely allergic to this is actually does a huge disservice. I think it's not unlike this, this person, you know, making you as a native speaker of English, you know, get your dissertation, pay three grand to get it, you know, kind of edited. Those hoops to jump through and what that means to slow the release of some of this work, or to kind of just demoralize scholars who are. We all have this different version, all these different insecurities or imposter syndrome, but what it means, then for those kinds of interventions and those kinds of gestures to be so illegible that folks don't know what to do with them. And so I was just wondering, first of all, is there work that you find, you found particularly useful that maybe is drawing on, on these other kinds from drawing from other disciplines, maybe in post-colonial studies or gender studies or critical race studies and so forth? I know particularly with the new project on thinking about the legal imagination and medieval Japan, that there's plenty of legal scholarship, particularly related to critical race theory that might be useful even as folks in Japan Studies might balk because it's too far afield. Which I think sometimes is a kind of convenient excuse, you know. So other things that, could you just talk about, like what you're trying to do in your work right now, and what's useful, what tools, conceptual or otherwise, that'd be great.
Vyjayanthi: So, I read very eclectically, and I'm currently reading The Things Things Say, because at the moment I'm thinking about medieval plays about land, you know, land disputes, legal disputes about land. But then it leads me to a prior question of how is land understood and how is land evoked? These are questions we as a field haven't considered. And one of the arguments in The Things Things Sayis that, you know, in order for a modern idea of property ownership to be born, you actually needed to have the legibility about the status of a thing as “thing.” So, you know, property and land needed to sort of literally walk away from where it was epistemologically housed and be seen as something alienable, other and worthy of, you know, disputing over. So, you know, of course I'm influenced by Reggie's work, as he thinks about the futurity that Noh drama, because of the outcaste status of his performers, is imagining possible futures. Noh drama is about the past. But what if we changed our point of entry and think about it as it's about the future and, you know, just changing.
So I'm really grateful for our scholars for changing those points of entry, for providing these epistemological hinges that allow us to say, "oh yeah, it doesn't have to be about this very set idea we had in mind." We could explore if it is imagining a new set of property relations, a new kind of futurity into place. So, you know, so that's based on what I'm currently reading right now.
And you mentioned post-colonial scholarship. So much about my point of view when approaching medieval texts is informed by Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. Like how changing the point of departure, you know, from center to metropolis, you know, from Europe to its provincial other, how all those moves are both, you know, we ought to think about them, not just as a switch-up, but what that means in ways of knowing and the kinds of questions it affords us and helps us think about how knowledge itself is produced. And a huge shout out to Raj Pandey, who also influenced by post-colonial scholarship is also changing the point of departure through which we approach, you know, medieval Japan.
Reginald: Yeah, no, I appreciate that so much. Her book is of the books that have come out in the past, you know, few years. The new book, on Genji and all of these things is my favorite set along these, along these lines, in terms of just really kind of rethinking from the ground up, in some ways, some of these things that we take for granted about Heian literature or medieval Japan more broadly. That's been really useful. I think Harrison had, you, you set some, some, some fireworks off, so I think Harrison had something.
Harrison: I just really appreciated that, that little sidebar about sort of property and what we think of, or how we consider sort of like the ontological status of things, right? And their agency, especially with regards to the environment and sustainability.
Vyjayanthi: Fabulous connection, Harrison. I believe, I can't recall, it's on the tip of my fingers right now, but I read scholarship that was taking it in exactly that direction. How we perceive the environment, how we perceive the built environment or the natural environment. What are the kinds of things we're naturalizing in those perceptions? I’m spacing on it, so I'm afraid I can't build on that.
What's the last thing I wanted to say? I think we, as scholars, often struggle to, you know, during our graduate school years, during our tenure track years, we struggled to find the voice with which we write. I certainly did. And part of the reason, part of what's holding us back from breaking out in our own voice is these roadblocks. What Reggie was talking about. Like, how will the journal editors perceive it, or how will a fellow field member perceive it? So we have these roadblocks that sort of constrain our voice. And I was just recently struck by reading Takeshi Watanabe’s work on the Eiga Monogatari, on the Flowering Tales. I mean, on its own, it's a really brilliant reading of Eiga Monogatari. But what I particularly appreciate about it is its voice. A very collaborative and empathetic tone, it takes both to its objective study, as well as the enterprise of scholarship. I often think that trying to break out on your own, like, you know, leave a mark, be the pioneer or whatever, it leads to crafting certain kinds of voices. I mean, it's an inevitable part of the process. But I also think we can look at models. I personally thought, I read Takeshi’s work and I thought, I wish I had had this model of a voice. It would have given me permission. [laughs] I could have given myself permission to have, you know, a different voice. So I think that's the other thing. As our field becomes more diverse, we have different vocalizations, different ways of approaching the material. I mean, that by their own voice signal a kind of inclusivity. By not saying this is my voice standing out on its own because.
That's kind of one of my pet peeves, where sometimes Anglo-American scholarship starts with “no one has studied this and I am standing alone studying this.” But that, that rests on ignoring Japanese scholarship that has in fact studied it, right? It's a particular hierarchy, racial hierarchy built into that. And so, you know, I'm enjoying the modeling of that collaborative voice, that jam that seeks to integrate these other voices into scholarship. But, and at the same time provides an example of it. Like his book it is precisely about how a text, instead of portraying an irascible other, integrates these voices, believes these voices, you know, should be heard, integrates them into the account of now, right? So how, you know, the history of the present, in his case of the 12th century, can only be written by not emptying out those voices, but bringing in those voices. You hear all that in the subject that he writes about.
Reginald: Yeah, thank you for that. And, I'm also a fan of Takeshi’s new book. I hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms but I think there's a kind of quiet assurance without being, you know, this kind of the flag-planting masculinist. I hadn't thought about that as much, so that's really a useful thing for me to hear too and I take seriously. I like that someone who thinks about these things, you know, these motifs, that we've kind of ended back with this notion of language and of voice and, you know, speaking different languages. And, you know, I mean, not just thinking in terms of code switching and as a way to kind of ensure one's survival, right? But also how that can actually be inspiring and it can allow for a good kind of self-authorizing when you see folks, uh, and you hear folks that are able to convey, not just this content, but a certain kind of a different mode of being, or of interacting with the world. I think that that's really a lovely way to, and maybe point on which to end.
You probably know where I'm going with this. I would put you in that category of folks who are doing that and who’ve done that through this very conversation. Because I know you to be humble to a fault. I think that you probably don't have a sense of the extent to which that's actually happening. But I really do hope that, and part of the reason we're doing this is that, that this can resonate with other people, you know, that you would not, you might not have, might not have been able to gain from all of your experience and wisdom. Heart, I think goes underrated. I mean, you're talking about in terms of voice, but I think about in terms of heart. There's a lot of things that I read that are competent, or even, you know, really virtuosic in their citational practice right? The bibliographies or historiographies that they managed to marshall. But heart is in short supply. I think that what you're saying about Takeshi's work, but also about work that I think that has really influenced you is exactly along these lines, right? Like it's like that extra thing. That authenticity, I think, and that's hard-won. I know in Takeshi’s case, it's really hard-won and he, he too has gone through a lot to be where he is. I know, he's spoken about this, but struggled to, to come into his own. Because these institutional structures have been in various ways arrayed against him. I'm sure that that for him to hear this whenever he hears this will mean a lot, and hopefully it also means a lot to a lot of the students and scholars around the world who will also be able to benefit from what you've said today.
I just want to thank you, you know. Heartfelt thanks for existing and for staying around, not letting these grumpy racists kick you out. The field is better for it and the world. I mean, I'd say the field is one tiny corner. We tend to forget of the world, but more broadly, you know. I'm sure your students are super lucky to have you and as are we, so thank you so much for being a part of this, Jayanthi..
Vyjayanthi: Thank you. This was a ball, this was a ball, and this is an awesome end, endeavor. Thank you for doing it.
Reginald: Anytime the conversation doesn't feel like work and is actually energizing at the end, given all the stuff we have to do, then that's, that's a testament to the guest. Thank you again. Thank you, Sophie, and thank you, Harrison, and, and Justin, I should say, Justin Schell of U of M Shapiro Design Lab, for all of your technical support as well. All right, take care, everybody.