The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism

by Rey Chow

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. To drastically reconceptualize ethnicity in the contemporary world, Chow proposes that it be examined in conjunction with Max Weber's famous theory about the Protestant work ethic and capitalism, which holds that secular belief in salvation often collaborates effectively with the interpellation, disciplining, and rewarding of subjects constituted by specific forms of labor. The charged figure that results from such a collaboration, resonant with the economic, psychological, and spiritual implications of the word "protest, " is what she refers to as the protestant ethnic.

Chow explores the vicissitudes of cross-ethnic representational politics in a diverse range of texts across multiple genres, including the writings of Georg Lukacs, Michel Foucault, Max Weber, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Etienne Balibar, Charlotte Brontë, Garrett Hongo, John Yau, and Frantz Fanon; the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Marguerite Duras, and Alain Resnais; and the cartoon drawings of Larry Feign. Tracing out hauntingly familiar scenarios from stereotyping and coercive mimeticism to collective narcissistic abjection, the rise of white feminist racial power, and intraethnic ressentiment, Chow articulates a series of interlocking critical dialogues that challenge readers into hitherto unimagined ways of thinking about an urgent topic.

Genres: Race, Philosophy, History, Economics, Post Colonial, Unfinished

237 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Rey Chow is a Chinese-American 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 at Duke University.

Chow's writing challenges assumptions in many different scholarly conversations including those about literature, film, visual media, sexuality and gender, postcolonialism, ethnicity, and cross-cultural politics. 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. Many of her explorations of critical concepts have been recognized by scholars as important, including her ideas about visualism, the ethnic subject and cultural translation.

Chow's research comprises theoretical, interdisciplinary, and textual analyses. Since her years as a graduate student at Stanford University, she has specialized in the making of cultural forms such as literature and film (with particular attention to East Asia, Western Europe, and North America), and in the discursive encounters among modernity, sexuality, postcoloniality, and ethnicity. Her book PRIMITIVE PASSIONS was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize by the Modern Language Association. Before coming to Duke, she was Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where she held appointments in the Departments of Comparative Literature, English, and Modern Culture and Media. In her current work, Chow is concerned with the legacies of poststructuralist theory, the politics of language as a postcolonial phenomenon, and the shifting paradigms for knowledge and lived experience in the age of visual technologies and digital media.

Reviews

[Vinay Khosla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Sat down and kept reading until I was finished. Highlights (colloquialized by me): recursively stereotyping logics of the ethnic ‘confessional’ memoir; dogged white women (feminism); explains Asian men’s reaction to Oxford study materializations (the not based, racial ressentiment version). Chow is my goat fr

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another I bought because she teaches at one of the programs that rejected me. Read about half or maybe a third of it. Liked it but had to set it aside for other things. Would like to pick back up sometime, but would probably have to start over from the beginning, since it's been so long.

[Hunter · Rating 5 out of 5]

really good

[Boka]

Loved it

[Hesam Wf · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was very happy with my decision to read this book. Often, Chow provides a nuanced look at some of the theoretical aspects of the ethnic subject's cultural experience in a white liberal capitalist society. For example, in her exploration of the ethnic subject's mimetic experiences she not only accounted for the mimetic realities of a non-white cultural being navigating a white cultural context as explored by the likes of Said and Bhaba, as is typically done in critical theoretical accounts of a non-white subject's social experience, but she also explored the mimetic expectation that the ethnic subject emulates the stereotypical cultural content of his particular ethnicity for social acceptance. This third mimetic reality is what she refers to as "self-ethnicization." Furthermore, in her exploration of self-ethnicization she looks at the expectation by other member's of one's ethnic group, in addition to members outside of one's ethnic group, to self-ethnicize. The point of sharing this with you is to highlight how I was impressed by the depth she would occasionally go to account for selected aspects of the ethnic subject's experience, and to share one of the important insights one can take away from this book.

Overall, one will find themselves learning from this book. My only issue is that, once in a while, I found myself skimming through her analysis of a particular film or literary work. This is because I tend to get bored of a thorough account of a work of a fiction. The conclusions she draws on the basis of such an analysis are useful, but for someone who is not a film and/or literature nerd (like myself) it can get a bit much. Then again, what else should one expect from a scholar of literature and film!

[Tiffany · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chow examines the notion of ethnicity as theoretically ambivalent and self-contradictory, and proposes re-reading ethnicity through Max Weber's theory about the Protestant work ethic and capitalism. Chow contends that Western Liberalism or "Liberalist cultural logic" draws on these discourses and often and ironically reinforces ethnic stereotypes and racism. Her deconstruction of the term "ethnicity" is productive and useful, but the text's central argument is sprawling and generally lacks cohesion. Chow's most salient points discuss what she refers to as "coercive mimeticism," the interpellation of the ethnic "as ethnic," and representations of the ethnic as abject.

[Jun Ogata · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good