Theory, thresholds and beyond

Abstract

This essay seeks to open up the question of the location of a critical disposition, the worldly conditions of analysis, and the vulnerability of languages, exposed to unacknowledged geographies, voices and places. The principal line of argument is that the accumulative force of Rey Chow's work forces us to consider how the rest of the world becomes a target for Euro-American theory. This propels us into the heart of darkness of a political, cultural and intellectual formation specific to the West. Focuses of analysis—whether literary, cinematic or social—turn out to present us with slippery and excessive definitions regarding their disciplinary location: they become the unsuspected sites of unauthorized and often unwelcomed questions. For Rey Chow's ‘style’ of intellectual work reveals a positionality that persistently stymies the universal and ‘neutral’ pretensions of the abstract knowledge proposed by the humanities. It is this gap, between pretence and positionality, that Chow consistently explores. Our attention is drawn through the details of analysis towards a further, unsuspected and unfamiliar shore from where the finitude of thought, its limits, blindness and epistemological conceits, can be traced. Pushed to confront its location in Occidental privilege, the largely silenced world that the Western academy nominates here returns bearing uncomfortable, perhaps even unanswerable, questions. It is this profound and unacknowledged provincialism that constitutes what Chow calls a ‘persistent epistemic scandal’.

Notes

1. Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target. Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

2. Chow, World Target, p 13.

3. Chow, World Target, p 89.

4. Chow, World Target, p 87.

5. This refers to the Sinologist Stephen Owen and his critique of the contemporary Chinese poet Bei Dao, discussed by Chow in the opening pages of Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

6. Achille Mbembe, ‘What is Postcolonial Thinking?’, Eurozine, 12, 2008: www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-01-09-mbembe-en.html

7. Chow, Writing Diaspora, p 116.

8. Chow, Writing Diaspora, p 4.

9. Chow, Writing Diaspora, p 25.

10. Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in their Apartments; Trinh T Minh-ha in her film Re-Assemblage.

11. Chow, Writing Diaspora, p 51.

12. Chow, Writing Diaspora, p 52.

13. Chow, Writing Diaspora, p 132.

14. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995; Rey Chow, Sentimental Fabulations: Contemporary Chinese Films, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

15. Chow, Primitive Passions, p 16.

16. Chow, Primitive Passions, p 28.

17. Chow, Primitive Passions, p 35.

18. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn. London: Pimlico, 1999.

19. Chow, Primitive Passions, pp 193–194.

20. Chow, Primitive Passions, p 195.

21. Chow, Primitive Passions, p 202.

22. Rey Chow, Ethics After Idealism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, p 5.