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Film and Culture Series
Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility
What is the sentimental? How can we understand it by way of the visual and narrative modes of signification specific to cinema and through the manners of social interaction and collective imagining specific to a particular culture in transition? What can the sentimental tell us about the precarious foundations of human coexistence in this age of globalization?
Rey Chow explores these questions through nine contemporary Chinese directors (Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou, Ann Hui, Peter Chan, Wayne Wang, Ang Lee, Li Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang) whose accomplishments have become historic events in world cinema. Approaching their works from multiple perspectives, including the question of origins, nostalgia, the everyday, feminine "psychic interiority," commodification, biopolitics, migration, education, homosexuality, kinship, and incest, and concluding with an account of the Chinese films' epistemic affinity with the Hollywood blockbuster Brokeback Mountain , Chow proposes that the sentimental is a discursive constellation traversing affect, time, identity, and social mores, a constellation whose contours tends to morph under different historical circumstances and in different genres and media. In contemporary Chinese films, she argues, the sentimental consistently takes the form not of revolution but of compromise, not of radical departure but of moderation, endurance, and accommodation. By naming these films sentimental fabulations —screen artifacts of cultural becoming with irreducible aesthetic, conceptual, and speculative logics of their own—Chow presents Chinese cinema first and foremost as an invitation to the pleasures and challenges of critical thinking.
Rey Chow explores these questions through nine contemporary Chinese directors (Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou, Ann Hui, Peter Chan, Wayne Wang, Ang Lee, Li Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang) whose accomplishments have become historic events in world cinema. Approaching their works from multiple perspectives, including the question of origins, nostalgia, the everyday, feminine "psychic interiority," commodification, biopolitics, migration, education, homosexuality, kinship, and incest, and concluding with an account of the Chinese films' epistemic affinity with the Hollywood blockbuster Brokeback Mountain , Chow proposes that the sentimental is a discursive constellation traversing affect, time, identity, and social mores, a constellation whose contours tends to morph under different historical circumstances and in different genres and media. In contemporary Chinese films, she argues, the sentimental consistently takes the form not of revolution but of compromise, not of radical departure but of moderation, endurance, and accommodation. By naming these films sentimental fabulations —screen artifacts of cultural becoming with irreducible aesthetic, conceptual, and speculative logics of their own—Chow presents Chinese cinema first and foremost as an invitation to the pleasures and challenges of critical thinking.
288 pages, Paperback
First published March 2, 2007
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111 people want to read
About the author
Rey Chow
47 books55 followersRey 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 26, 2025
In Sentimental Fabulations: Contemporary Chinese Films, Rey Chow argues that China’s most significant contribution to international film culture is sentimentalism, offering a compelling reappraisal of melodrama’s central role in both popular and art cinema. Challenging the critical tradition that often dismisses melodrama as vulgar or excessive, Chow positions it as a powerful mode through which historical trauma, national identity, and gender representations are emotionally reimagined. Her concept of “sentimental fabulation” reveals how affect operates not merely as an aesthetic device but as a cultural and political strategy. Despite its theoretical density, this book is a rewarding and thought-provoking read for anyone interested in Chinese cinema or the politics of cinematic emotion.
What makes Chow’s intervention particularly striking is her critical stance toward the dominant left-leaning tendencies in film criticism, especially the valorization of socialist realism as the ethical and aesthetic ideal. In the Chinese context, she argues, this realist imperative has often suppressed the more ambivalent and emotionally charged experiences of modernity. Rather than treating melodrama as a distraction from “serious” political content, Chow explores it as a legitimate and revealing aesthetic form—one that gives access to submerged affective histories and collective anxieties. Her nuanced engagement invites a reconsideration of sentimental narrative not as ideological regression, but as a way of registering the complexities of modern subjectivity.
Chow’s work also carries broader implications for the study of non-Western cinemas, such as Turkish cinema, where melodrama has long been a dominant yet critically marginalized mode. By taking sentimentalism seriously—not as a sign of aesthetic deficiency but as a culturally embedded response to modernity—Sentimental Fabulations offers a paradigmatic shift in how we read emotional excess, narrative structure, and historical memory in global cinema. It challenges scholars and critics to re-evaluate the assumptions that have shaped canonical film criticism, especially the tendency to dismiss melodramatic traditions in favor of realist or overtly political modes.
Another key dimension of Chow’s analysis is her treatment of themes such as home and family—not as regressive or oppressive structures to be deconstructed, as is often the case in modernist cinema discourse, but as constitutive narrative and affective centers in both popular and art-house Chinese films. Instead of subjecting these notions to automatic ideological critique, Chow examines how they function as emotional and cultural anchors within a rapidly modernizing society. Her approach opens up new ways of understanding how cinema articulates collective longing, loss, and continuity through intimate, often domestic, spaces.
For readers seeking to move beyond the critical clichés that often frame discussions of non-Western cinemas, Chow’s book offers a refreshing and rigorous starting point. By attending seriously to sentiment, melodrama, and the emotional textures of cinematic storytelling, Sentimental Fabulations clears a path toward more nuanced and culturally attuned readings of global film traditions.
What makes Chow’s intervention particularly striking is her critical stance toward the dominant left-leaning tendencies in film criticism, especially the valorization of socialist realism as the ethical and aesthetic ideal. In the Chinese context, she argues, this realist imperative has often suppressed the more ambivalent and emotionally charged experiences of modernity. Rather than treating melodrama as a distraction from “serious” political content, Chow explores it as a legitimate and revealing aesthetic form—one that gives access to submerged affective histories and collective anxieties. Her nuanced engagement invites a reconsideration of sentimental narrative not as ideological regression, but as a way of registering the complexities of modern subjectivity.
Chow’s work also carries broader implications for the study of non-Western cinemas, such as Turkish cinema, where melodrama has long been a dominant yet critically marginalized mode. By taking sentimentalism seriously—not as a sign of aesthetic deficiency but as a culturally embedded response to modernity—Sentimental Fabulations offers a paradigmatic shift in how we read emotional excess, narrative structure, and historical memory in global cinema. It challenges scholars and critics to re-evaluate the assumptions that have shaped canonical film criticism, especially the tendency to dismiss melodramatic traditions in favor of realist or overtly political modes.
Another key dimension of Chow’s analysis is her treatment of themes such as home and family—not as regressive or oppressive structures to be deconstructed, as is often the case in modernist cinema discourse, but as constitutive narrative and affective centers in both popular and art-house Chinese films. Instead of subjecting these notions to automatic ideological critique, Chow examines how they function as emotional and cultural anchors within a rapidly modernizing society. Her approach opens up new ways of understanding how cinema articulates collective longing, loss, and continuity through intimate, often domestic, spaces.
For readers seeking to move beyond the critical clichés that often frame discussions of non-Western cinemas, Chow’s book offers a refreshing and rigorous starting point. By attending seriously to sentiment, melodrama, and the emotional textures of cinematic storytelling, Sentimental Fabulations clears a path toward more nuanced and culturally attuned readings of global film traditions.
Want to read
October 2, 2007Appertain to my current research. recommended by a friend who teaches English in Cornell.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews