Reading Rey Chow

Abstract

This article examines some key concerns and problematics that are regularly engaged in the work of Rey Chow, and relates them to the theoretical and political problematics of cultural studies as an ethico-political project. It associates Chow's work with strong impulses and many of the abiding concerns that define the projects of such thinkers as Stuart Hall and Jacques Derrida, whilst also connecting her interventions to other key problematics in the fields of cultural studies, poststructuralist cultural theory and postcolonial studies. It shows that Chow's work tests and explores political, theoretical and philosophical interpretive machines and positions by way of very close and yet wide-ranging readings of all manner of ‘objects’, unconstrained by contingent disciplinary demarcations (such as those between literature, media, popular culture, film, identity, and so on), in a way that reveals the complex discursive relations, reticulations, implicit and explicit interconnections between as well as gaps, hiatuses, aporias and barriers across putatively separate ‘realms’.