Reading Rey Chow

Abstract

This article examines some key concerns and problematics that are regularly engaged in the work of Rey Chow, and relates them to the theoretical and political problematics of cultural studies as an ethico-political project. It associates Chow's work with strong impulses and many of the abiding concerns that define the projects of such thinkers as Stuart Hall and Jacques Derrida, whilst also connecting her interventions to other key problematics in the fields of cultural studies, poststructuralist cultural theory and postcolonial studies. It shows that Chow's work tests and explores political, theoretical and philosophical interpretive machines and positions by way of very close and yet wide-ranging readings of all manner of ‘objects’, unconstrained by contingent disciplinary demarcations (such as those between literature, media, popular culture, film, identity, and so on), in a way that reveals the complex discursive relations, reticulations, implicit and explicit interconnections between as well as gaps, hiatuses, aporias and barriers across putatively separate ‘realms’.

Notes

1. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, 1992, pp 277–294, p 285.

2. Hall, ‘Cultural Studies’, p 285.

3. See, for instance, Rey Chow, ‘The Postcolonial Difference: Lessons in Cultural Legitimation’, Postcolonial Studies 1(2), 1998, pp 161–169.

4. Hall, ‘Cultural Studies’, p 285.

5. Gayatri Spivak uses the term in her ‘Translator's Preface’ to Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p lxxxii. The meaning of this is discussed more fully below.

6. For example, Chow's ‘Brushes with the-Other-as-Face: Stereotyping and Cross-Ethnic Representation’, in The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, especially pp 54–60.

7. See Chantal Mouffe, On the Political, London: Routledge, 2005, especially ch 2, ‘Politics and the Political’.

8. But there are others. See, for instance, John Mowitt, Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992; or Paul Bowman, Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies: Theory, Politics and Intervention, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

9. Spivak, ‘Translator's Preface’, p lxxxii; emphases in the original.

10. Jacques Derrida, ‘Resistances’, in Resistances of Psychoanalysis, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, p 35.

11. See for instance Chow's chapter ‘The Dream of a Butterfly’ in Ethics After Idealism, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998, pp 74–97.

12. Hall, ‘Cultural Studies’, p 285.

13. Rey Chow, ‘The Age of the World Target: Atomic Bombs, Alterity, Area Studies’, in The Age of the World Target, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, pp 25–43.

14. Rey Chow, ‘Introduction’, in Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p 11.

15. Chow quotes from Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, foreword by Paul Bové, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, pp 52, 58, 59. See Sentimental Fabulations, p 11.

16. Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, p 11.

17. Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, p 11.

18. Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, p 11.

19. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, p 63.

20. For Jacques Rancière, the political moment is a certain ‘kind of speech situation’—which he calls one of ‘disagreement’. It is ‘one in which one of the interlocutors at once understands and does not understand what the other is saying. Disagreement is not the conflict between one who says white and another who says black. It is the conflict between one who says white and another who also says white but does not understand the same thing by it.’ Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p x. See also Benjamin Arditi, Politics on the Edges of Liberalism: Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007, p 115.

21. Rey Chow, ‘The Political Economy of Vision in Happy Times and Not One Less; or, A Different Type of Migration’, in Sentimental Fabulations, p 165.

22. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, pp 106–109.

23. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p 174, n 12.

24. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, p 1.

25. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 1985, p 144.

26. Chow, Ethics After Idealism, p 101.

27. Chow, Ethics After Idealism, p 101.

28. Chow, Ethics After Idealism, pp 101–102.

29. Chow, Writing Diaspora, p 25.

30. Chow, Protestant Ethnic, p 115.

31. Chow, Protestant Ethnic, p 124.

32. Chow, Protestant Ethnic, p 124.

33. As Chow writes of the ethnic academic subject: ‘Her only viable option seems to be that of reproducing a specific version of herself—and her ethnicity—that has, somehow, already been endorsed and approved by the specialists of her culture.’ Chow, Protestant Ethnic, p 117.

34. Chow, Protestant Ethnic, p 117.

35. Quoted in Chow, Protestant Ethnic, p 95.

36. Chow, Protestant Ethnic, p 110.

37. Chow, Protestant Ethnic, p 117.

38. Chow, Protestant Ethnic, p 117.

39. Chow, Protestant Ethnic, p 117.

40. Chow, Writing Diaspora, p 18.

41. Chow, Ethics After Idealism, p 113.

42. Chow, Writing Diaspora, p 11.

43. Chow, Writing Diaspora, pp 10–11.

44. Chow, Writing Diaspora, p 11.

45. Yet, one might ask, what could be clearer to an academic or intellectual than the following act of ‘undeciding’: ‘whatever choice I might make, I cannot say with good conscience that I have made a good choice or that I have assumed my responsibilities. Every time that I hear someone say that “I have taken a decision”, or “I have assumed my responsibilities”, I am suspicious because if there is responsibility or decision one cannot determine them as such or have certainty or good conscience with regard to them. If I conduct myself particularly well with regard to someone, I know that it is to the detriment of an other; of one nation to the detriment of another nation, of one family to the detriment of another family, of my friends to the detriment of other friends or none friends, etc’. Jacques Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, in Chantal Mouffe (ed), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, London: Routledge, 1996, p 86.

46. Chow, Ethics After Idealism, p 8.

47. Chow, Ethics After Idealism, p 8.

48. Chow, Ethics After Idealism, p 9.

49. Chow, Ethics After Idealism, p 6.

50. Chow, Ethics After Idealism, p 6. For Chow's elaboration of this notion of information target fields, see The Age of the World Target.

51. Chow, Ethics After Idealism, pp 6–7.

52. Chow, Ethics After Idealism, pp 12–13.