Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Part I Humanistic Inquiry in the Era of the Moralist- Entrepreneur -- Introduction Rearticulating "Outside" -- Part II Exercises in the Unthought -- 1 Literary Study's Biopolitics -- 2 " There Is a 'There Is' of Light"; or, Foucault's (In)visibilities -- 3 Thinking "Race" with Foucault It -- 4 "Fragments at Once Random and Necessary" The Énoncé Revisited, Alongside Acousmatic Listening -- 5 From the Confessing Animal to the Smartself -- CODA Intimations from a Series of Faces Drawn in Sand -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index

Although the era of European colonialism has long passed, misgivings about the inequality of the encounters between European and non-European languages persist in many parts of the postcolonial world. This unfinished state of affairs, this lingering historical experience of being caught among unequal languages, is the subject of Rey Chow''s book. A diverse group of personae, never before assembled in a similar manner, make their appearances in the various chapters: the young mulatto happening upon a photograph about skin color in a popular magazine; the man from Martinique hearing himself named "Negro" in public in France; call center agents in India trained to Americanize their accents while speaking with customers; the Algerian Jewish philosopher reflecting on his relation to the French language; African intellectuals debating the pros and cons of using English for purposes of creative writing; the translator acting by turns as a traitor and as a mourner in the course of cross-cultural exchange; Cantonese-speaking writers of Chinese contemplating the politics of food consumption; radio drama workers straddling the forms of traditional storytelling and mediatized sound broadcast. In these riveting scenes of speaking and writing imbricated with race, pigmentation, and class demarcations, Chow suggests, postcolonial languaging becomes, de facto, an order of biopolitics. The native speaker, the fulcrum figure often accorded a transcendent status, is realigned here as the repository of illusory linguistic origins and unities. By inserting British and post-British Hong Kong (the city where she grew up) into the languaging controversies that tend to be pursued in Francophone (and occasionally Anglophone) deliberations, and by sketching the fraught situations faced by those coping with the specifics of using Chinese while negotiating with English, Chow not only redefines the geopolitical boundaries of postcolonial inquiry but also demonstrates how such inquiry must articulate historical experience to the habits, practices, affects, and imaginaries based in sounds and scripts

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Note on Translations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. When Reflexivity Becomes Porn: Mutations of a Modernist Theoretical Practice -- 2. On Captivation: A Remainder from the "Indistinction of Art and Nonart" (written with Julian Rohrhuber) -- 3. Fateful Attachments: On Collecting, Fidelity, and Lao She -- 4. Sacrifice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood -- 5. "I insist on the Christian dimension": On Forgiveness . . . and the Outside of the Human -- 6. American Studies in Japan, Japan in American Studies: Challenges of the Heterolingual Address -- 7. Postcolonial Visibilities: Questions Inspired by Deleuze's Method -- 8. Framing the Original: Toward a New Visibility of the Orient -- Postscript. Intimations from a Scene of Capture -- Index

The question explored in this article pertains to the type of exchange specific to human relations we call forgiveness. Hannah Arendt's comments on the subject provide a compelling justification for its necessity: "Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacks the magic formula to break the spell." Yet, precisely the imperative nature of forgiveness may be a source of epistemic conundrums. To elaborate this point, the author begins with a reference to a striking key episode at the heart of the South Korean film Miryang [Secret Sunshine] (2007), which stages forgiveness in the context of Christian evangelism. The article goes on to argue, through a discussion of the writings of Derrida and Auerbach, among others, that the connotations of forgiveness extend considerably beyond a strictly religious dimension, going so far as to bear on contemporary theoretical questions about translation and the secularization of representation.

rey chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where she teaches in the Departments of Modern Culture and Media, and Comparative Literature. She is the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is Ethics after Idealism:Theory–Culture–Ethnicity–Reading (Indiana University Press, 1998). She is also editor of Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (Duke University Press,forthcoming).

rey chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where she teaches in the Departments of Modern Culture and Media, and Comparative Literature. She is the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is Ethics after Idealism:Theory–Culture–Ethnicity–Reading (Indiana University Press, 1998). She is also editor of Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (Duke University Press,forthcoming).

rey chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where she teaches in the Departments of Modern Culture and Media, and Comparative Literature. She is the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is Ethics after Idealism: Theory–Culture–Ethnicity–Reading (Indiana University Press, 1998). She is also editor of Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (Duke University Press,forthcoming).