Rey Chow

Rey Chow (born 1957) is a cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and film and postcolonial theory. Educated in Hong Kong and the United States, she has taught at several major American universities, including Brown University. Chow is currently Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University.

Chow's writing challenges assumptions in many different scholarly conversations including those about literature, film, visual media, sexuality and gender, ethnicity, and cross-cultural politics. Inspired by the critical traditions of poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and cultural studies, Chow explores the problematic assumptions about non-Western cultures and ethnic minorities within the context of academic discourse as well as in more public discourses about ethnic and cultural identity. Her critical explorations in visualism, the ethnic subject and cultural translation have been cited by Paul Bowman as being particular influential.

Early life and academic background Chow was born in Hong Kong and grew up in a Muslim family. She went to high school in Hong Kong and received a bachelor's degree at the University of Hong Kong. She received a doctorate in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1986. In 1996, she became a professor in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of California, Irvine. Later, she became Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University. She has led a seminar at the School of Criticism and Theory. Chow currently is the Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University. When reviewing The Rey Chow Reader, Alvin Ka Hin Wong called Chow's critical activities as mostly about "provocation" in which she forces new conversations in various scholarly areas, such as the study of Chinese culture, theories of cross-cultural contact and Western critiques of modernity.

Rey Chow's work has also been collected, anthologized and received special recognition in a number of academic spaces. Paul Bowman collected a number of her essays in the Rey Chow Reader published by Columbia University Press. Bowman also provided editorial support for two issues of academic articles focused entirely on Chow. Volume 20, issue 4 of the journal Social Semiotics was devoted to exploring Rey Chow's works as they relate to the field of semiotics.

Chow has served on the editorial board for a number of academic journals and forums, including differences, Arcade, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, and South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as on the advisory board of feminist journal Signs.

Critical method and topics

When exploring Chow's approach to criticism in The Rey Chow Reader, Paul Bowman describes Chow's critical theory as an approach based on poststructuralism, specifically influenced by Derrida's deconstruction, and cultural theory derived from Stuart Hall. In particular, though Chow's research started in literary studies, her later work broaches larger academic concerns, similar to those negotiated by poststructuralist critical theorists. However, even while comparing her work to poststructuralist critical theory, Bowman says that Chow rethinks the concept that post-structuralist arguments need "always make things more complicated," instead trying to make these ideas more manageable. As part of her deconstructionist approach, she is concerned with the problems of signification within parts of society outside of literature.

Using the above-mentioned approach, Chow has made significant interventions in the critical conversation surrounding postcolonial and other critical theory. The following subsections highlight some of Chow's interventions acknowledged by scholarly literature. The first section, looking at visuality and visualism, explores how individuals are converted into symbols or signs, one of her main themes. The second section focuses on the use of signification as it applies to an ethnic subject and how that ethnic subject feels they must represent themselves within society. The third explores how a concept of representation, authenticity, influences how scholars construct translations.

Visualism

One of Chow's major critiques of modernity relies on the idea of visualism. Visualism is the conversion of things, thoughts or ideas into visual objects, such as film or charts. Chow builds her ideas from the scholarly discourse on Visuality. She relies on two theorists concepts of visuality: Foucault's concept that visual images, such as film, maps or charts, are tools of biopower as well as Heidegger critique that in modern culture everything “becomes a picture”.

Ethnic subject One of the central ideas for many critical theorists is the idea of the subject. Rey Chow studies the idea of subjectivity in light of ethnicity, especially the subjectivity of ethnic minorities. In exploring the ethnic subject, she builds on the ideas of Foucault alongside psychoanalytic concepts. One of her central concepts concerning the ethnic subject states that the individual becomes ethnic through the pressure created by social systems to do self-confessional literature, or literature that seeks to explore one's own ethnicity. Through this idea, she challenges the conventional idea that these self-confessional writings can create ethnic liberation. For Chow then, the self-confessional literature allows the hegemonic culture to evoke a stereotyped ethnicity from individuals. In describing this stereotyped ethnicity, she focuses on how individuals must act "authentic" in representing an ethnic culture or they become the focus of criticism. Thus society interpellates individuals to perform ethnicity, but the individual only imitates a certain standard of authentic ethnicity because of the coercion created by the larger society. Chow calls these performance of ethnicity "coercive mimeticism", because the individual only simulates ethnicity in reaction to the social pressure placed on that individual to fulfill a certain ethnic role. Also, Chow describes how often the individual who provide the coercion are not of the hegemonic culture, but rather members of ethnic communities. Ethnic individuals become the main source of criticism for other individuals not being "ethnic enough". Thus, for Chow, identification of individuals as "ethnic" can become a tool for belittling amongst individuals of minority cultures as well as a means of maintaining the hegemonic subjugation of those individuals. Chow challenges these faithfulness arguments by exploring how they interfere with the potentially useful process of clarification that can arise when converting a text from one cultural situation to another. Chow sees the clarification as providing the opportunity for obscured cultural practices to become more "visible as a cultural construct." Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East. University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Indiana University Press, 1993. Xie zai jia guo yi wai [寫在家國以外]. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1995. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema.Columbia University Press, 1995. Ethics after Idealism: Theory – Culture – Ethnicity – Reading. Indiana University Press, 1998. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Columbia University Press, 2002. Il sogno di Butterfly: costellazioni postcoloniali. Rome: Meltemi Editore, 2004. Translated by M.R. Dagostino. The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work. Duke University Press, 2006. Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility. Columbia University Press, 2007. The Rey Chow Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Duke University Press, 2012. Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience. Columbia University Press, 2014. A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present. Columbia University Press, 2021.