A critic of the way sinologists, Orientalists, and Western intellectuals have traditionally approaced China and the "East," Rey Chow refuses to assign China "absolute difference" from the West and instead stakes her ground "neither in the Chinese nor the Western but rather on a dialectic on which 'Chinese' and 'Western' is played" (WCM x.v.i.i.). As a consequence, Chow's work is germane to many disciplines. She has written extensively on film, feminism, fascism, pedagogy, and the "modernism-postmodernism problematic." Chow seeks to reread Chinese culture with the hope of achieving an understanding of Òotherness that goes beyond colonial discourse" (WD).
Biography
Born in Hong Kong and educated in both British colonial and American institutions, Chow occupies a unique position for theorizing China. Of her education, Chow writes:
The advantage of a continuous and complete institutional education, even when that education was British colonial and American, means thatÉI have not been "subordinated." Even though my "personal" history is written with many forms of otherness, when combined with the background of my education, is not that of victim but of a specific kind of social power, which enables me to speak and write by wielding the tools of my enemies (Writing Diaspora 22).
Chow received her doctorate in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University and went on to teach at the University of Minnesota. Since 1992, she has been Professor in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of California, Irvine. Author of three books and countless articles, Rey Chow is also co-editor of the Duke University Press series "Asia Pacific: Culture, Politics, Society." Her book, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (1995) won the James Russell Lowell Prize in 1996.
Some Notes on Writing Diaspora
Rey
Chow's second book, Writing Diaspora (1993-- hereafter: WD),
is a collection of eight essays centered on questions of an "intellectualization"
of a "diasporic consciousness," with the specific intent of showing the
complexities and pitfalls of understanding both China and diaspora as fields
of study (22). In doing so, Chow works towards intervening in the contradictions
and complicities between scholarship, pedagogy, and the social and political
situation between China and the West.
Citing Michel de Certeau, Chow upholds the idea of a "tactic" over the traditional use of "strategies." She maintains that a strategy belongs "to those who are committed to the building, growth, and fornication of a 'field,'" and conversely, a tactic is "a calculated action determined by an absence of a proper locus" (16). Strategic attitudes lead to the re-inscription of old ideologies while professing newfound "solidarities" formulated according to a rhetoric of political change and difference. Although Chow is chiefly concerned with China in many of the essays in WD, she never allows it to become a "field." Rather, she selects objects of study that include Chinese intellectual and political history, pop music in Hong Knog, language and literature departments in American Universities, and film in assembling points of intervention that never fall into specific disciplinary or geographic loci.
The Strategists
The insistence on China's difference from the West has been generated from within China as much as from without. Among those perpetuating a "culturally specific" context are the sinologists. Sinologists are a band of preservationists whose aim is to vouchsafe Chinese culture from modernity. The sinologist is fundamentally self-interested; and as China becomes increasing modernized, he is overcome by the loss of his beloved object (4). Just as dangerous are the "Maoists," who in their desire to be located in the other, valorize the other's deprivation and espouse a self-righteous politic of lack, subalternity, and victimization (13). Chinese intellectuals--miserably strategy-less--are "vanguards" (in Barthes' sense) who consult traditional knowledge rather than ask "What does it mean to be Chinese?" (WD 93). Further complicating matters are American universities that recruit "area specialists" and, in the process, "ghettoize" Chinese culture along geographic, rather than disciplinary, lines. Adding to that dilemma is the fact that Chinese literature is often taught as an pobject of the past in a sinologist's mode or only as an afterthought to the language teaching that economic globalization demands
Tactics of Intervention
Arguably the most widely-read among Chow's essays is the second of WD, "Where Have All the Natives Gone?" In this essay Chow examines the construction of images of the "native," which despite (or perhaps because of) their ubiquity, remain elusive. "Native" works, bifurcated as either timeless (the art museum sentiment) or historical (the ethnographic museum), are determined in post-imperialist discourse by the search for "authenticity." Expanding Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" to include people as well as objects, Chow argues that questions about the native are questions about the irreversibility of modernity. If technological reproduction is inevitable, Chow inquires, is cultural displacement also?(48)
How are we then to conceive of the native? Ought we to criticize the image itself? Devise another way of conceiving otherness that is free of the image? (48) Chow's solution is an extended politic that considers the cultural other in terms of Rousseau's (by way of Lacan) "big Other." She does so as a way of getting at a more general definition of difference without essentializing or privilieging any specific form of alterity:
Books
by Rey Chow
Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.
Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
Women and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
Selected Articles By Rey Chow
"A Souvenir of Love." Modern Chinese Literature. 7:2. Fall 1993: 59-78.
"Between Colonizers: Hong Kong Post-colonial Self-Writing in the 1990s."Diaspora.
2:2.
Fall 1992: 151-70.
"Ethics After Idealism." Diacritics. 23:1. Spring 1993: 3-22.
"Male Narcissism and National Culture: Subjectivity in Chen Kaige's
King of Children."
Camera Obscura. 25-6:1. Jan-May 1997: 9-40.
"Roland Barthes: Empire of Signs." Constructions. 1986: 17-23.
"Things, Common/Places, Passages of the Port City: On Hong Kong and Hong Kong's Author Leung Ping-kwan. Differences. 5:3. Fall 1993: 179-204.
"The Fascist Longings in Our Midst." ARIEL. 26:1. Jan. 1995: 23-50.
"Walter Benjamin's Love Affair With Death." New German Critique. 48. 1989: 63-86.
Two internet Sources
A Review of Women and Chinese Modernity:
http://muse.jhv.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/V002/2.2r_connery.html
For Information on Chinese Cinema:
http://www.wooster.edu/chinese/Chinese_Film.html
Author: Rebecca Viksnens, Spring 1998.
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