Shakespeare in Japan: Disability and a Pedagogy of Disorientation

This essay describes what happened in the author’s Shakespeare classroom at Tokyo International University in the wake of a deadly stabbing attack at a residential care center for people with disabilities in nearby Sagamihara. Allison Hobgood discovers that the importance of Shakespeare in processing and responding to the Sagamihara attack was, paradoxically, his relative non-importance to her students, as compared with Shakespeare’s elevated status among U.S. undergraduates. Her model of a “feminist disability pedagogy of disorientation” decentralizes stoic analysis and mastery in favor of “immersive, deeply affective, real-time experiential learning.” By juxtaposing irreverent adaptations and selected close readings from Macbeth with frank discussions of cultural attitudes toward disability, Hobgood and her students carved out a space for Shakespeare to speak to their disorienting present, fashioning in their responses to Shakespeare a framework for more just thought and action.