不像说母语者：作为后殖民体验的言语

by Rey Chow, 周蕾, 周云龙 (Translator)

《不像说母语者》是华裔文化批评家周蕾基于种族、语言、身份认同的研究作品。出于自身对身份认同的敏感，周蕾观察到语言带来的不平等与失语，反思不同肤色和阶级的语言与写作，认为语言实际上成为一种生命政治的秩序。

从德里达对法语的自传性反思入手，到与非洲小说家钦努阿·阿契贝同等的对语言先天论的烦恼，继而“揭开语言尚未痊愈的伤疤”，作者潜入巴金、梁秉钧、马国明、本雅明、保罗·利科等人的文本，重新思索翻译作为一种跨文化与跨语言现象所带来的失落感。本书不仅重新定义了后殖民研究中的地缘政治边界，还展示了如何将历史经验与基于声音和剧本的习惯、实践、情感、想象联系起来。

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

216 pages, Unknown Binding

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.

[javor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book that starts out really strong but, imo, loses focus in the later chapters. Chow's notion of the xenophone and reimagining nativity and nonnative languaging in the nexus of (post)coloniality and racialization seems very important in changing how we imagine practices of languaging beyond standard political/linguistic (Chomskyan, fluentist, nativist, monolingualist, etc.) paradigms. Something that disappointed me (as a researcher of language disability) was the employment of the concept of aphasia in the introduction without going into depth about the politics of real aphasia; too often, metaphors of language disability (voicelessness, inability to speak, being silenced, etc.) are employed to connote disempowerment, without due consideration for those with real language disabilities like aphasia, and I was hopeful Chow might address this more in depth, though what he did end up discussing would still be relevant. In any case, great little book overall, if a bit loosely connected.

[Mills College Library]

306.44 C5528 2014