Books by Rey Chow

Questions aspects of cultural politics, including the legacies of European imperialism and colonialism, the media, pedagogy, literature, literacy, sexuality, intellectual labour, the uses and abuses of theory, and popularized notions about 'others'. This book sets up an oppositional discursive space in the midst of these new solidarities.

Although the era of European colonialism has long passed, misgivings about the inequality of the encounters between European and non-European languages persist in many parts of the postcolonial world. This unfinished state of affairs, this lingering historical experience of being caught among unequal languages, is the subject of Rey Chow's book. A diverse group of personae, never before assembled in a similar manner, make their appearances in the various chapters: the young mulatto happening upon a photograph about skin color in a popular magazine; the man from Martinique hearing himself named "e;Negro"e; in public in France; call center agents in India trained to Americanize their accents while speaking with customers; the Algerian Jewish philosopher reflecting on his relation to the French language; African intellectuals debating the pros and cons of using English for purposes of creative writing; the translator acting by turns as a traitor and as a mourner in the course of cross-cultural exchange; Cantonese-speaking writers of Chinese contemplating the politics of food consumption; radio drama workers straddling the forms of traditional storytelling and mediatized sound broadcast. In these riveting scenes of speaking and writing imbricated with race, pigmentation, and class demarcations, Chow suggests, postcolonial languaging becomes, de facto, an order of biopolitics. The native speaker, the fulcrum figure often accorded a transcendent status, is realigned here as the repository of illusory linguistic origins and unities. By inserting British and post-British Hong Kong (the city where she grew up) into the languaging controversies that tend to be pursued in Francophone (and occasionally Anglophone) deliberations, and by sketching the fraught situations faced by those coping with the specifics of using Chinese while negotiating with English, Chow not only redefines the geopolitical boundaries of postcolonial inquiry but also demonstrates how such inquiry must articulate historical experience to the habits, practices, affects, and imaginaries based in sounds and scripts.

Bringing together a variety of texts about modern China, Chow examines the relationship of "woman" with issues of non-Western culture, including ethnic spectatorship, popular literature, the construction of literary history and the revolutionary production and reception of national literature.

This follow-up volume to our book The Age of the World Target collects interconnected entangled essays of literary and cultural theorist Rey Chow. The essays take up ideas of violence, capture, identification, temporality, sacrifice, and victimhood, engaging with theorists from Derrida and Deleuze to Agamben and Ranciere.

A theoretical exploration of the connected roles of area studies, poststructuralist theory, and comparative literature in constructing the world as a target for U.S. imperialism

A collection of essays which use critical theory to reflect on issues pertaining to modern Chinese literature and culture. It addresses topics such as 20th-century literature produced in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China; film, art, history, popular culture, and literary and cultural criticism and the geographies of migration and diaspora.