Performance e politica nel primo Meiji

In this paper I explore the political performance of the early Meiji era focusing on the inception and development of three genres that de- veloped during the time of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement (1874-1889): political kōdan (seiji kōdan), political songs (enka), and activists’ plays (sōshi shibai). I address this issues referring to the mod- el developed by David Schlossman based on symbolic interactionism, which describes political performance as an exchange between individ- uals working in distinct yet overlapping social worlds. After delineating the main features of the contemporary social world of politics, I show how the above three different kinds of political performance represent different kinds of interchange between the two worlds of performance and politics.