Martin Heidegger once wrote that the world had, in the age of modern science, become a world picture. For Rey Chow, the world has, in the age of atomic bombs, become a world target, to be attacked once it is identified, or so global geopolitics, dominated by the United States since the end of the Second World War, seems repeatedly to confirm. How to articulate the problematics of knowledge production with this aggressive targeting of the world? Chow attempts such an (...) articulation by probing the significance of the chronological proximity of area studies, poststructuralist theory, and comparative literature—fields of inquiry that have each exerted considerable influence but whose mutual implicatedness as postwar U.S. academic phenomena has seldom been theorized. Central to Chow’s discussions is a critique of the predicament of self-referentiality—the compulsive move to interiorize that, in her view, constitutes the collective frenzy of our age—in different contemporary epistemic registers, including the self-consciously avant-garde as well as the militaristic and culturally supremacist. Urging her readers to think beyond the inward-turning focus on EuroAmerica that tends to characterize even the most radical gestures of Western self-deconstruction, Chow envisions much broader intellectual premises for future transcultural work, with reading practices aimed at restoring words and things to their constitutive exteriority. (shrink)

At its proper and most radical, humanistic inquiry is about problems that do not have ready solutions. If this fundamental feature had been accepted, debates about the humanities in recent years might have taken a different kind of turn, whereby, instead of appending new and ever more purposeful modifiers to the word humanities--the digital, the environmental, the neuro, the medical, the public--the ways in which humanistic modes of intellectual labor operate could have assumed a more central focus. This would not (...) have to mean adopting a conservative or conservatively disciplinary stance toward the humanities. Rather, it would demonstrate the ways in which humanistic inquiry approaches intellectual problems conceptually, methodologically, and practically, without necessarily seeking to legitimize the relevance of its undertakings by way of social utility and consensus.This possibility of reimagining humanistic study is the basic assumption and orientation of this book. Many books make use of Foucault's theories, but few use his work to reflect on the conundrums, dead ends, and potentialities of humanistic inquiry in the current Western academy. By juxtaposing debates about literary study, visibilities and invisibilities, sound/voice/listening, race/racism, and self- governance/entrepreneurship in a unique constellation against what Chow polemicizes as the moral instrumentalization of knowledge, A Face Drawn in Sand is intended as an intervention in some of the most pressing issues facing humanistic study today: how to process and analyze texts; how to form and sustain arguments; how to reconceptualize familiar problems through lesser known as well as very well known sources. Above all, how not to have the answers before the questions. (shrink)

Dans cet article constitué d’extraits de Writing Diaspora (1993), la théoricienne post-coloniale Rey Chow propose une critique en règle des intérêts poursuivis par la recherche académique quand elle investit les figures des subalternes et spécifiquement des « natif·ves » du monde non-occidental. Dans la lignée des travaux de Saïd sur l’orientalisme, Rey Chow dresse le portrait ironique de l’universitaire « maoïste », qui cherche le salut dans l’Orient (ou l’indigène) exotisé. À l’inverse, elle appelle à reconnaître la puissance du silence (...) de la native, un refus de parler qui peut faire bégayer l’ordre du discours, pourvu qu’on y prête l’oreille. (shrink)

Sound has given rise to many rich theoretical reflections, but when compared to the study of images, the study of sound continues to be marginalized. How is the “sense” of sound constituted and elaborated linguistically, textually, technologically, phenomenologically, and geologically, as well as acoustically? How is sound grasped as an object? Considering sound both within and beyond the scope of the human senses, contributors from literature, film, music, philosophy, anthropology, media and communication, and science and technology studies address topics that (...) range from Descartes’s resonant subject to the gendering of hearing physiology in the nineteenth century, Cold War politics and the opera _Nixon in China_, sounds from the Mediterranean, the poetics of signal processing, and the acousmatic voice in the age of MP3s. In the interpretive challenges posed by voice, noise, antinoise, whispering, near inaudibility, and silence and in the frequent noncoincidence of emission and reception, sound confronts us with what might be called its inhuman qualities—its irreducibility to meaning, to communication, to information, and even to recognition and identification. _Rey Chow_ is Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University. She is the author of _The Age of the World Target _and_ Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory_, both_ _published by Duke University Press. _James A. Steintrager _is Professor and Chair of English at the University of California, Irvine. _ Contributors:_ Caroline Bassett, Eugenie Brinkema, Iain Chambers, Michel Chion, Rey Chow,_ _Mladen Dolar, Veit Erlmann, Evan Johnson, Christopher Lee, Mara Mills, John Mowitt, Dominic Pettman, Tara Rodgers, Nicholas Seaver, James A. Steintrager, Jonathan Sterne. (shrink)