Postcolonial Studies Issue

Here are the abstracts for the Postcolonial Studies issue that is forthcoming on Rey Chow in the Autumn:

 

Paul Bowman

Reading Rey Chow

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’.

 

Iain Chambers

Theory, thresholds and beyond

This essay seeks to open up the question of the location of a critical disposition, the worldly conditions of analysis, and the vulnerabilty of languages, exposed to unacknowledged geographies, voices and places. The principal line of argument 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 unauthorised 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 pretense 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 academcy 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’.

 

 

John Frow

Hybrid disciplinarity: Rey Chow and comparative studies

The question of comparison has been central to all of Rey Chow’s work. She understands it not as an exercise performed upon a common ground, but as the drawing together of incommensurable places and objects of knowledge; its point is not to gain prestige within a dominant cultural field and not simply to reverse the hierarchy obtaining between centre and margin, but to generalise the condition of otherness. The analogy she posits between the  stakes of aesthetic reflection and the politics of cultural difference in a field without a stable hierarchy or a normative centre has pay-offs both for the methodology of literary studies and for reflection on cultural politics, and it restores the link between them. This article looks at the grounding of her practice of comparison in the Kantian concept of an ungrounded reflective judgement and in a notion of the heterogeneous ‘field’ which is its condition of possibility.

 

 

Marinos Pourgouris

Rey Chow and The Hauntological Specters of Poststructuralism

One of the most persistent themes in Rey Chow’s work is the concept of the ethnic and the ways in which it has been redefined in a poststructuralist context. This essay examines Chow’s critique of poststructuralist theory, particularly as it pertains to the concepts of nationalism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism.  Contrary to the predominant definitions of nationalism and ethnicity, Chow’s work challenges the largely unquestioned tendency in contemporary theory to be both humanistic, or cosmopolitan, and to deconstruct any ‘fixed’ meaning. Chow’s theoretical position underlines the fact that such theoretical de-constructions, first and foremost, ignore the social and political problems that are irrevocably linked to the question of ethnicity. It also exposes the ways in which poststructuralist theory’s critique of ethnicity inadvertently serves the Western logocentrism that it originally set out to deconstruct. Finally, this article focuses on the relevance of Chow’s critique to the status of national departments in the University setting and the definition of Comparative Literature as a field.

 

James Steintrager

Hermeneutic Heresy: Rey Chow on Translation in Theory and the ‘Fable’ of Culture

Translation is a topic that seems to come and go with regularity on the literary theory scene. It has most recently enjoyed a vogue among comparatists, who have positioned translation as a way to renew—yet again—their discipline (see, for example, Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone). Translation has also been discussed in the context of feminism, deconstruction, and postcolonial studies. With respect to the last grouping, the writings of Niranjana, Spivak, and Chow stand out. In this essay, I return to Chow’s discussion of translation and national identity in Primitive Passions. I am particularly interested in showing how Chow, almost alone, attempts in that work to overcome the dominant hermeneutic paradigm that informs other theorists on translation, from the cultural conservatism of George Steiner to the declared radicalism of Spivak and of more recent works such as Bassnett and Trivedi’s edited volume Postcolonial Translation Theory. I argue that none of these writers has taken up the challenge to hermeneutics that Chow posited and explored specifically with regard to Fifth Generation Chinese filmmakers. Chow’s challenge, I claim, resides in her focus on mediation as key to understanding both identity formation and the construction of “culture” itself. Using theorists of media and social systems such as Friedrich Kittler and Niklas Luhmann, I go on to unfold Chow’s discovery and demonstrate that hermeneutics and the translation theory derived from it are largely products of print and that the shift to film in the global marketplace has undermined the conceptual apparatus of both.

 

 

Rey Chow

Fleeing Objects

Chow responds to the general discussion of her work, including the five essays in this special issue, by posing the question of the vanishing object of study in the age of boundary-crossing interdisciplinarity.