Rey Chow

Preface Jane Chi Hyun Park's excellent 2010 book, Yellow Future: Oriental Style in American Cinema concludes with a focused discussion of The Matrix (1999), of kung fu, and of the problematic of orientalism. The very conclusion of the book's final chapter -the very last words of the book (before the summing up of the afterword)takes the form of a consideration of the question of whether 'The Matrix signaled a positive step for Asian American representation' (Park 2010: 196). Park tells us that this question was directly posed to her by a student -an Asian American studentand that when she (in impeccable pedagogical style) asked him what he thought about his own question, she reports that he 'did not think The Matrix was such a good thing because, even as it rendered him [i.e., the Asian American student] visible -and some might say in a not necessarily negative way -this visibility was limited to the question "Do you know kung fu?"'

This is the first book-length study of the groundbreaking work of Rey Chow, whose work has transformed the fields of postcolonialism, cultural studies, film, ethnicity and gender. It describes and explains the features and the breadth of Chow's interventions and illustrates Chow's arguments by way of the analysis of a range of engaging examples drawn from the fields of film, popular music, identity and popular culture. Chow's work is of interest and importance to anyone working on questions of international and transnational film; popular culture; postcolonialism; poststructuralism; and Chinese, Hong Kong and Asian identity in different national contexts; as well as sex, gender and ethnic politics in general. This book elaborates on and illustrates Chow's fascinating contributions to scholarship and knowledge across many different fields by arguing that her work can best be understood in relation to the "projects" of cultural studies and postcolonial studies. In this way, the work sets out both the enduring importance of these wider projects and the importance of Rey Chow's contributions to them.

The Rey Chow Reader:
Modernity, Postcolonial Ethnicity, Filmic Visuality,
& Transcultural Politics

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
PREFACE:
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: Paul Bowman


Part 1
MODERNITY & POSTCOLONIAL ETHNICITY

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: Paul Bowman

1. The Age of the World Target: Atomic Bombs, Alterity, Area Studies
• Seeing Is Destroying
• The World Becomes Virtual
• The Orbit of Self and Other
• From Atomic Bombs to Area Studies

2. The postcolonial difference: lessons in cultural legitimation

3. Leading Questions, Writing Diaspora
• Orientalism and East Asia: The Persistence of a Scholarly Tradition
• Sanctifying the “Subaltern”: The Productivity of White Guilt
• Tactics of Intervention
• The Chinese Lesson

4. Brushes with Other as Face: Stereotyping and Cross-Ethnic Representation
• The Inevitability of Stereotypes

5. The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation, and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon
• Race and the Problem of Admittance
• Community Formation and Sexual Difference: A Double Theoretical Discourse
• What Does the Woman of Color Want?
• The Force of Miscegenation
• Community Building among Theorists of Postcoloniality

6. When Whiteness Feminizes...: Some Consequences of a Supplementary Logic
• Is “Woman” a Woman, a Man, or What? The Unstable Status of Woman in Contemporary Cultural Criticism


Part 2
FILMIC VISUALITY & TRANSCULTURAL POLITICS

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION: Paul Bowman

7. Film and Cultural Identity

8. Seeing Modern China: Toward a Theory of Ethnic Spectatorship

9. The Dream of a Butterfly
• “East Is East and West Is West, and Ne’er the Twain Shall Meet”
• “The Beauty. . . of Her Death. It’s a . . . Pure Sacrifice.”
• The Force of Butterfly; or, the “Oriental Woman” as Phallus
• “Under the Robes, beneath Everything, It Was Always Me”
• “It’s Not the Story; It’s the Music”
• Madame Butterfly, C’est Moi
• Coda: New Questions for Cultural Difference and Identity

10. Film as Ethnography
• The Primacy of To-Be-Looked-At-ness
• Translation and the Problem of Origins
• Translation as “Cultural Resistance”
• The “Third Term”
• Weakness, Fluidity, and the Fabling of the World
• The Light of the Arcade

11. A Filmic Staging of Postwar Geotemporal Politics: Kurosawa Akira’s No Regrets for Our Youth, Sixty Years Later

12. Sentimental Fabulations: Contemporary Chinese Films
• Where is the movie about me?
• Highlights of a Western Discipline
• Image, Time, Identity: Trajectories of Becoming Visible
• Defining the Sentimental in Relation to Contemporary Chinese Cinema

13. ‘Woman,’ Fetish, Particularism: Articulating Chinese Cinema with a Cross-Cultural Problematic
• ‘Woman’ as commodity and fetish: some observations about Chinese cinema
• Anglophone feminist film theory and the moral high ground of particularism
• Fetish power unbound

NOTES
INDEX

de Sófocles ocupa una posición peculiar en la historia de los estudios sobre la tragedia griega; considerada a menudo como paradigma del género, como ejemplo representativo de los rasgos temáticos y formales que definen a una tragedia ateniense, e incluso a una tragedia a secas 1, no ha dejado de señalarse sin embargo que su trama resulta un tanto peculiar, y que en ciertos aspectos su estructura constituye un caso único y aberrante frente a los patrones usuales en los dramas de SÓfocles, y por supuesto de Esquilo y Eurípides 2.

definitive written statements given by Bruce Lee on the subject of what he wanted to teachnamely a revolutionary approach to martial arts that he called "Jeet Kune Do". It is important to note this because, since his death, Lee"s name has been attached to the wholesale and indiscriminate posthumous publication of selections from his notebooks, college essays, journals and jotters, and these include many unattributed but readily traceable quotations from other thinkersall of which ultimately make Bruce Lee seem to be a barefaced plagiaristas if he himself made the decision to publish "his" words in that form, after he died. We will return to this, below. But "Liberate Yourself from Classical Karate" was signed and signed off by Bruce Lee. It is his manifesto for "Jeet Kune Do".

No consideration of Bruce Lee -or indeed of the beyond of Bruce Lee -can overlook his importance as a muse, an inspiration, and an educator. I have followed the likes of Meaghan Morris and Davis Miller before in foregrounding this dimension of Lee's legacies, and want to do so again in this paper, because of the fundamental and perennial significance of this topic for studies of Lee, of martial arts, and indeed of culture tout court. So, in this paper, I return to key examples and instances of Bruce Lee (and) pedagogy, in order to set out and then to move beyond the established ground, and into some vexed debates about philosophy, ideology and cultural translation. So, the paper begins with a discussion of Bruce Lee's philosophy of Jeet Kune Do, before moving into reconsiderations of the relations between film and philosophy, culture and ideology, as well as politics and ethics. It draws Lee's oeuvre and intervention into relations with (other) Western popularisers of Zen, Taoism and Buddhism, as well as with thinkers such as

Talk given on 1st February 2016 at the China Institute, School of
Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

This talk poses the question of Bruce Lee’s national identity. Of course, the facts of this matter are widely known: there is no mystery or controversy about the US passport that Bruce Lee held from the age of eighteen. However, one question that constantly recurs is that of his ethno-national ‘cultural identity’: who owns Bruce Lee? China? Bruce Lee is after all ethnically Chinese and his first language was Cantonese. But he was born in San Francisco, raised in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, and became a US citizen at eighteen… This multiple, moving, migrant status is not unique to Bruce Lee, of course. But in all of the discourses about him there remain strong drives to ‘place’ him or ‘claim’ him – whether for a place (America, Hong Kong, China, or the world), or a people (Americans, ‘Chinese everywhere’, the colonised subaltern, this or that ethnic minority), or a ‘style’ (Wing Chun Kung Fu, ‘American Freestyle Karate’, even MMA), or an ideology (‘Western’, ‘Eastern’, ‘New Age’, ‘Postmodern’). This paper seeks to interrogate such appropriative impulses, and to examine them in terms offered by several approaches: Derridean deconstruction, Rey Chow’s (Benjaminian) take on ‘culture’, and a Rancièrean notion of ‘policing’. It does so in order to propose certain ways to think critically about acts of cultural ‘placing’.

The Import of the Comparative in Comparative Literature 'It seems to me that the "comparative" in comparative literature is equally, if not more, crucial a factor in considering the future of comparative literature: exactly what constitutes "comparison"what kinds of relations, critical formations, analytical perspectives are relevant?' (Chow, "In the Name of Comparative Literature" 107) Rey Chow, in this statement, highlights the very concern of most Comparative theorists with regard to the comparative in comparative literature. This essay, too, will reflect on and engage with the comparative and its various implications, locate the same within the selected works of Susan Bassnett and The Bernheimer Report, as well as Mary Louise Pratt's response to the Report, and attempt to contextualise it within the area of comparative literature. A final, concluding commentary will also be made on what can be said about the relevance and future of comparative literature.

This paper reads the emergence of ‘Oriental style’ in Hollywood (Park 2010) as an exemplary case of what Rey Chow calls ‘cultural translation (Chow 1995). The paper explores the intimate yet paradoxical relationship between ‘Oriental’ martial arts and the drive for ‘authenticity’ in both film choreography and martial arts practices; plotting the trajectories of key martial arts crossovers since Bruce Lee. It argues that, post-Bruce Lee, Western film fight choreography first moved into and then moved away from overtly Chinese, Japanese, Hong Kong or indeed obviously ‘Oriental style’; a move that many have regarded as a deracination or westernisation of fight choreography. However, a closer look reveals that this apparent deracination is actually the unacknowledged rise of Filipino martial arts within Hollywood. The significance of making this point, and the point of making this kind argument overall boils down to the insight it can give us into how ‘cultures’ and texts are constructed, and also into our own reading practices and the roles they play, sometimes in perpetuating certain problematic ethno-nationalist discourses.

This chapter seeks to intervene into current ways of constructing, perceiving, partitioning, policing and discoursing about pedagogy. Specifically, it seeks to flesh out one possible way to reorientate discourse about and practices of pedagogy away from the current simplistic and stultifying focus on "teaching and learning". Such a reorientation would be an improvement because it is a limited and limiting conception of pedagogy. Yet it has a strong and constraining hold on educational discourse at all levels. Moreover, the topics or problematics of pedagogy, of didactics, of learning, can be shown to far exceed the current myopic focus on teacher-student relations or indeed "learning resource"-student relations, or, worse, "student-centredlearning".

n the concluding chapter of Primitive Passions (1995), in a chapter entitled "Film as Ethnography," Rey Chow asks the question of the relationships between ethnography and the complex matter of visual media representations. She asks this because by and large any serious consideration of the impact and implications of filmic, TV and other media representations have traditionally been excluded or subordinated in the conceptualization and construction of the classical anthropological ethnographic "scene." The ethnographic scene is a scenario most commonly formulated as being a situation involving an ethnographer and a native subject (or group). The presence and role of all manner of media are not normally immediately considered in this scenario. Yet the contemporary world is, and has been for well over a century, saturated with media-and moreover with a range of mediated images that often claim to testify to some kind of insight into other cultures, in a quasianthropological way. There are also types of media text that seem to constitute, precipitate or otherwise relate to one or another kind of cross-cultural encounter, and so on. (I have written about this in Bowman 2010.) The documentary film is perhaps the exemplary contemporary form of media genre that has closest affinities with anthropology; just as the wide variety of texts that seem to represent "other cultures," however falsely or fictitiously-such as action films, set in "exotic" locations-can be numbered among the media which may precipitate various forms of cross-cultural encounter. Both have, to a significant extent, superseded earlier media forms, such as the newspaper report and genres of travel writing, which had been popular for hundreds of years, and that had provided "information" and ideas about different cultures and societies.

The Age of the Whirled Target: Post-Babel-ism

Paul Bowman

This paper relates narratives about the plight of academic aspirations to the story of Babel. It focuses on the well-worn topic of academic language, primarily the controversies about theoretical languages such as those of poststructuralism, although it argues that this theme is intimately connected to the problematics of (crisis or catastrophe in) the very possibility of a common humanity/ies. The paper discusses the reasons why the usual suspects have so frequently been singled out and blamed not only for the apparent destruction of Enlightenment projects organised along the lines of reconstructing the Tower of Babel but also of irreverently dancing in the ruins of this project. The usual suspects include, of course: ‘the’ theorists, postmodernists, postcolonialists, multiculturalists and poststructuralists; those now-familiar bugbears and scapegoats, whose erstwhile ‘controversial’ status is coming to seem rather dated and perhaps even decrepit; so much so that with the waning of the discursive shock-waves of all of these once so-threatening ‘post-s’, it may seem that we are now, perhaps, post-catastrophe. So, the paper asks after the after of the two catastrophes of the post-: the shocks of post-structuralism’s irruption and the ripples of its receding. It asks after what is happening and what could happen, in the post, in/to the humanities, post-catastrophe.

This talk will use the notion of discourse, as developed by theorists such as Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau, to approach the topic of China. It will explore the changing connotations of ‘China’ in a range of different contexts – both Western and Chinese, cultural and academic – and will illustrate this primarily by discussing the status of China in a range of films (Chinese, Hong Kong and US). The aim of the talk is double: both to illuminate ‘China’ by way of the theory of discourse at the same time as illuminating the theory of discourse by way of a consideration of ‘China’.

本次讲座将以语言学理论中的语篇概念来阐述中国这个话题。保罗教授将从中国与西方，文化与学术等不同语境中来探寻“中国”一词的内涵变迁，首先讨论的将是中国在各种（本土/香港/美国）电影中的地位。此次讲座的目标有二，一是通过语篇的概念来阐明“中国”，二是通过讨论中国来阐明语篇理论。

What it means to be from Hong Kong or a “Hong Kong person” is a question being asked with increasing frequency as the conflict between Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China worsens. The British Empire and its former presence and influence in Hong Kong becomes, in such discussions, inevitably foregrounded. This article investigates how postcolonial Gothic writing can be used to understand the crisis of identity Hong Kong faced during the 1997 turnover and now faces. In postcolonial Gothic Hong Kong literature, the return of Chinese rule during the turnover and the recent longing for a return to British rule manifest as tangible undead, monsters of hybridity who were repressed and are now awakening. Using Rebecca Bradley and Stewart Sloan’s Temutma as a case study, I discuss the utility of postcolonial Gothic thought and writing when attempting to represent the difficulties of reconciling Hong Kong’s contested cultural identity.

The aim of the article is to discuss Jasmila Žbanić’s Esma’s Secret (Grbavica, 2006), On the Path (Na Putu, 2010) and For Those Who Can Tell No Tales (Za one koji ne mogu da govore, 2013) as a trilogy addressing the consequences of Bosnian War. The films are considered in the theoretical framework of women’s cinema as world cinema, exploring their location in relation to globalization. The article hence analyses each film’s aesthetic in light of influential feminist concepts and theories such as Rey Chow’s age of the world target, Adriana Cavarero’s horrorism and caring, E Ann Kaplan’s trauma and Judith Butler’s ethics. In these films the violated body is neither victimized nor considered as a natural being: each character is a biopolitical subject, geo-culturally located, and produced through processes originating from dynamics of power and responsibility, guilt and care.

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 both to be 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.

Keeping with her broader interests in cultural studies, diaspora, and visual media, Rey Chow’s latest book,
Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking About Capture, stands at the intersection of aesthetics and politics to confront the role of the mediated image in renewed modes of transnational communication. Each of the eight chapters weaves together a theory of what Chow calls “entanglements”—a critical
terminology anchored within and against poststructural and postcolonial interests in global ruptures, displacements, and local specificities.“ Entanglements” as a theoretical framework for transnational cultural studies indicates that physical proximity and historical continuity are no longer sufficient measures of the spaces of cultural contact; neither is rupture the only remaining line of difference. Hence, “entanglements”
offers a mode for rethinking ties to political visibility and representation, captivity and victimization, and retributive justice, and collective power.