Rey Chow

Rey Chow (born 1957) is a cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and film and postcolonial theory.

Educated in Hong Kong and the United States, she has taught at several major American universities, including Brown University.

Chow is currently Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University.

Chow's writing challenges assumptions in many different scholarly conversations including those about literature, film, visual media, sexuality and gender, ethnicity, and cross-cultural politics.

Inspired by the critical traditions of poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and cultural studies, Chow explores the problematic assumptions about non-Western cultures and ethnic minorities within the context of academic discourse as well as in more public discourses about ethnic and cultural identity.

Her critical explorations in visualism, the ethnic subject and cultural translation have been cited by Paul Bowman as being particular influential.

Chow was born in Hong Kong.

She went to high school in Hong Kong and received a bachelor's degree at the University of Hong Kong.

She received a doctorate in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1986.

When analyzing the impact of Rey Chow's work for an article in the journal Social Semiotics, Chow scholar Paul Bowman highlights two important ways in which Chow has affected scholarship: first, she has helped diversify the research agenda of Chinese Studies scholars by problematizing the concept of "modern" and modernity, introducing gender issues, and bringing mass culture to studies of Chinese culture and literature with her first book Woman and Chinese modernity (1991); and, second, she has challenged many assumptions about ethnicity and ethnic studies through her books Ethics After Idealism (1998), The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002), The Age of the World Target (2006), and Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese films (2007).

When reviewing The Rey Chow Reader, Alvin Ka Hin Wong called Chow's critical activities as mostly about "provocation" in which she forces new conversations in various scholarly areas, such as the study of Chinese culture, theories of cross-cultural contact and Western critiques of modernity.

Rey Chow's work has also been collected, anthologized and received special recognition in a number of academic spaces.

Paul Bowman collected a number of her essays in the Rey Chow Reader published by Columbia University Press.

Bowman also provided editorial support for two issues of academic articles focused entirely on Chow.

Volume 20, issue 4 of the journal Social Semiotics was devoted to exploring Rey Chow's works as they relate to the field of semiotics.

Volume 13, issues 3 of the journal Postcolonial Studies explores the interdisciplinary application of her concepts to postcolonial studies.

Chow has served on the editorial board for a number of academic journals and forums, including differences, Arcade, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, and South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as on the advisory board of feminist journal Signs.

When exploring Chow's approach to criticism in The Rey Chow Reader, Paul Bowman describes Chow's critical theory as an approach based on poststructuralism, specifically influenced by Derrida's deconstruction, and cultural theory derived from Stuart Hall.

In particular, though Chow's research started in literary studies, her later work broaches larger academic concerns, similar to those negotiated by poststructuralist critical theorists.

However, even while comparing her work to poststructuralist critical theory, Bowman says that Chow rethinks the concept that post-structuralist arguments need "always make things more complicated," instead trying to make these ideas more manageable.

As part of her deconstructionist approach, she is concerned with the problems of signification within parts of society outside of literature.

Using the above-mentioned approach, Chow has made significant interventions in the critical conversation surrounding postcolonial and other critical theory.

The following subsections highlight some of Chow's interventions acknowledged by scholarly literature.

The first section, looking at visuality and visualism, explores how individuals are converted into symbols or signs, one of her main themes.

The second section focuses on the use of signification as it applies to an ethnic subject and how that ethnic subject feels they must represent themselves within society.

The third explores how a concept of representation, authenticity, influences how scholars construct translations.

One of Chow's major critiques of modernity relies on the idea of visualism.

Visualism is the conversion of things, thoughts or ideas into visual objects, such as film or charts.

Chow builds her ideas from the scholarly discourse on Visuality.

She relies on two theorists concepts of visuality: Foucault's concept that visual images, such as film, maps or charts, are tools of biopower as well as Heidegger critique that in modern culture everything “becomes a picture”.

Within her work, Chow doesn't see ethnicity as a necessary classification.

Rather Chow describes ethnicity as construct created by discourse which is rooted in the impulse to classify and understand the world in the terms of images.

Thus for Chow, ethnicity and the creation of the "other" relies on the assumption that individual should and can be classified by their visual features.

Speaking within feminist discourses, Chow also uses the idea of visualism to critique the popular concepts of women.

For Chow, society consigns women to being visual images.

In 1996, she became a professor in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of California, Irvine.

Later, she became Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University.

She has led a seminar at the School of Criticism and Theory.

Chow currently is the Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University.

Chow has made important contributions to a number of fields.