How might the pornographic be associated with Brecht's and Benjamin's media theories? How are Foucault's and Deleuze's writings on visibilities "postcolonial"? What happens when Rancière's discussions of art are juxtaposed with cultural anthropology? What does a story by Lao She about collecting reveal about political collectivism in modern China? How does Girard's notion of mimetic violence speak to identity politics? How might Arendt's and Derrida's reflections on forgiveness be supplemented by a film by Lee Chang-dong? What can Akira Kurosawa's films about Japan say about American Studies? How is Asia framed transnationally, with what consequences for those who self-identify as Asian?These questions are dispersively heterologous yet mutually implicated. This paradoxical character of their discursive relations is what Rey Chow intends with the word "entanglements," by which she means, first, an enmeshment of topics: the mediatized image in modernist reflexivity; captivation and identification; victimhood; the place of East Asia in globalized Western academic study. Beyond enmeshment, she asks, can entanglements be phenomena that are not defined by affinity or proximity? Might entanglements be about partition and disparity rather than about conjunction and similarity?Across medial forms (including theater, film, narrative, digitization, and photographic art), and against more popular trends of declaring things and people to be in flux, Chow proposes conceptual frames that foreground instead aesthetic, ontological, and sentient experiences of force, dominance, submission, fidelity, antagonism, masochism, letting-go, and the attraction to self-annihilation. Boundary, trap, capture, captivation, sacrifice, and mimesis: these riveting terms serve as analytic pressure points in her readings, articulating perversity, madness, and terror to pursuits of freedom.

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Product Description: In late-capitalist Western society, cross-ethnic cultural transactions are an inevitable daily routine. Yet, according to acclaimed cultural critic Rey Chow, the notion of ethnicity as it is currently used is theoretically ambivalent, confusing, indeed self-contradictory, straddling as it does an uneasy boundary between a universalist rhetoric of inclusion on the one hand, and actual, lived experiences of violence and intolerance on the other...read more

Product Description: These groundbreaking essays use critical theory to reflect on issues pertaining to modern Chinese literature and culture and, in the process, transform the definition and conceptualization of the field of modern Chinese studies itself...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

In "Ethics after Idealism", Rey Chow explores once again the issue of cultural otherness that has been central to her work since the publication of "Woman and Chinese Modernity". At a time when cultural identity has become irreversibly imbricated with the manners in which we read our many 'others', Chow argues, what demands to be examined critically is no longer identity politics per se but, more precisely, the idealism - especially in the sense of idealizing otherness - that lies at the heart of identity politics. Recognizing the necessity for a critique of idealism - the necessity to see how idealism is constructed, consolidated and perpetuated, and mobilized with disturbing consequences - constitutes for Chow an ethics in the postcolonial, postmodern age. In particular, she uses 'ethics' to refer to the act of taking decisions - in this context, decisions of reading - that may not immediately conform with prevalent social mores of idealizing our others but that, nonetheless, would enable such others to emerge in their full, albeit irrational, complexities. From theorists Slavoj Zizek and Gayatri Spivak to Frantz Fanon, from songwriter Luo Dayou to poet Leung Ping-kwan, and from the film "M. Butterfly" to the films "The Joy Luck Club", "To Live", and "Rouge", Chow discusses a collection of source materials whose affinities are as surprising as their appearances are diverse. The readings she offers involve multiple cultural forms - including fiction, film, popular music, poetry, and critical essays - as well as a range of cultural topics - including pedagogy, multiculturalism, fascism, sexuality, miscegenation, community, fantasy, governance, nostalgia, and postcoloniality. Methodologically situated in the contentious spaces between critical theory and cultural studies, and always attentive to the implications of ethnicity in contemporary cultural politics, Chow's work should be of interest to readers from many scholarly disciplines.