Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience

by Rey Chow

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Post Colonial, Language, Cultural Studies, Theory, Sociology

192 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2014

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

[Elijah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent review of what of why language is the battleground site for cultural imperialism in a lot of ways due to the legacies of imperialism and colonialism as practiced by Europe and the West.

[Tyler Horton · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting little collection of five essays loosely connected by the subject of language. My rating should very much be taken as my own impression and not anything more than that. This is a genre that I don't really read and don't really 'get'.

I am listening to David Salle's How To See, a book about how to look at and talk about art, and I sense that there is significant overlap between what Chow is doing here and Salle is doing as he talks about art. My wheelhouse is philology in a fairly strict sense and so these kinds of writings often strike me as being too subjective. But I recognize that part of that impression comes from my own foreignness to this field. I think I'm not sure how to decide when something is compelling. I can follow along and see how someone 'could' see and say that looking at a particular subject, but I'm not sure that someone 'needs' or 'ought' to see and say it. Again, that is surely partly due to my unfamiliarity with these subjects and interpretations but I wonder if there is something distinct on a more fundamental level.

I came to this book because of the essay which shares titles with the book. There is definitely worthwhile material here. I plan to go back through that particular essay to get a better sense of how Chow's insight goes beyond that of Chinua Achebe, who she sides with there.

[yuefei · Rating 4 out of 5]

rly illuminating with derrida’s monolingualism of the other; unfolding the implications of the latter in a series of tableaux grounded in postcolonial experiences of language (which extends to media, modernity, and the coloniality of standardised putonghua). wish she touched more on racialisation in relation to language, but it feels like it was left in the periphery after the intro.

discourses of modernity as a kind of translation & a “betrayal” / cultural melancholy (reconstruction of lost object) & contemporaneity as a process of construction / the xenophone (as opposed to the native speaker) as someone who touches language while standing on its borders & in so doing reshapes it (reading of benjamin’s aura—languages holds experience).

i feel chow has a similar attitude to language as derrida; a lyricism that foregrounds longing as the driving force behind acts of speaking (a longing to feel at home in/with the other)—which makes it all the more beautiful to end this series of reflections with an anamnesis about sound and muteness.

[Mills College Library]

306.44 C5528 2014