Abstract
Based on her sharp, cutting-edge analyses of a wide range of theoretical and aesthetic texts, Rey Chow deconstructs the ideological surface of the world’s configuration of political power structures and social processes under the global neoliberal capitalist world order. In particular, her attention is directed to the objects of aesthetic reflection, which according to her reside both within and beyond the film, literary text, or work of art. Lost, found or fleeting, these objects ground human consciousness and are a major constitutive of cultural memory, knowledge production, and creativity. Her work includes analyses of the interventions of postcolonial intellectuals, who after decades of anticolonial struggles still find themselves confronted with the West’s colonial-imperialist attitudes, policies and poetics. Studying the objects of postcolonial world-making, Chow concentrates on the peripheries and contact zones, where ethnic inequalities cannot fully be hidden underneath glossy transcultural fassades. In order to shed light on the unintended side effects of western universalizing theories, she scrutinizes the displaced meanings of widely used concepts such as language, translation, mimesis, melancholy, visuality, or entanglement when applied in postcolonial aesthetic contexts. New meanings are unearthed from modernist, post-colonial, post-structuralist and other theories when shifted onto the plane of alternative models of worlding and community formation in sinophone writers’ and film directors’ works.
Riemenschnitter, Andrea Hong Anrui