Paul Bowman

The Rey Chow Reader

Rey Chow is arguably one of the most prominent intellectuals working in the humanities today. Characteristically confronting both entrenched and emergent issues in the interlocking fields of literature, film and visual studies, sexuality and gender, postcolonialism, ethnicity, and cross-cultural politics, her works produce surprising connections among divergent topics at the same time as they compel us to think through the ethical and political ramifications of our academic, epistemic, and cultural practices. This anthology - the first to collect key moments in Chows engaging thought - provides readers with an ideal introduction to some of her most forceful theoretical explorations. Organized into two sections, each of which begins with a brief statement designed to establish linkages among various discursive fields through Chows writings, the anthology also contains an extensive Editors Introduction, which situates Chows work in the context of contemporary critical debates. For all those pursuing transnational cultural theory and cultural studies, this book is an essential resource.

Popular Cultural Pedagogy, in Theory; Or: What Can Cultural Theory Learn about Learning from Popular Culture?.

Central to politicized academic projects such as cultural studies and politicized work in cultural theory and philosophy is a critique of the cultural power of institutions——pedagogical institutions in particular. In thinkers as diverse as Gramsci, Althusser, Derrida, Bourdieu, Rancière, Spivak, Hall, Giroux and way beyond, distinct——albeit often widely differing——theories of the social, subjective, cultural, ideological and political importance of pedagogical institutions and practices can be discerned as being central. Culture has been theorized as pedagogy. In several languages and many contexts ‘culture’ and ‘education’ can be used interchangeably. This issue of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory seeks to explore the dual proposition (1) that pedagogy is central to politicized cultural theory, but (2) that it has been under-explored——both as constitutive of politicized cultural theory as such, and in relation to the question of what can be learned about pedagogy as such by studying popular culture accordingly. So this issue asks: Given the often implicit but nevertheless demonstrable centrality of the themes of pedagogy to politicized cultural theory and philosophy: what paradigms, models or theories of pedagogy are implied in popular forms of cultural theory and philosophy? And what might or ought such popular theory itself (or themselves) be able to learn about learning from the popular culture it theorizes? This issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory invited contributions which would interrogate the notions of pedagogy that are active within specific forms of cultural theory and/or which offer new theorizations of pedagogy by way of analysis of popular cultural texts, practices, institutions or processes. The range of responses to this call have been diverse; and all evince the multiplicity of the pedagogical, its variable dynamics and even its unpredictability. Moreover, since formulating this project, there has been a violent mutation both in British academic institutions and arguably also in

This Disagreement is Not One: The Populisms of Laclau, Rancière and Arditi

Consider this disagreement. First, Ernesto Laclau, the arch-theorist of culture and politics as hegemony, has taken to arguing that all politics is basically populism (Laclau 2005). Second, Jacques Rancière has recently declared that populism is nothing more than ‘‘the convenient name under which is dissimulated [ . . .] the difficulty [of] government’’: ‘‘The hope is that under this name they will be able to lump together every form of dissent in relation to the prevailing consensus, whether it involves democratic affirmation or religious and racial fanaticism’’ (Rancière 2006, 80). In other words, for Rancière, ‘‘populism’’, here, is really just a pejorative term for a situation in which a people will not be governed ‘‘properly’’, without division or remainder. Third, however, Benjamin Arditi’s new book both takes issue with Laclau’s reduction of all species of

Autodidactics of Bits: Cultural studies and the partition of the pedagogical

Abstract This article explores a minor work by Adrian Rifkin, a work which focuses primarily on his research method of parataxis, but which this article reads for what it offers to a reconsideration of pedagogy, or ‘teaching and learning’. The article argues that Adrian Rifkin has long been a ‘Rancièrean’ within UK cultural studies, and that this history has yet to be fully assessed. The importance of Rifkin’s Rancièrean pedagogical and research methods is laid out by discussing his interventions in the context of the growing (strangle)hold of prescriptive and reductive quasi-managerialist ‘teaching and learning’ protocols within academia. The article aspires to draw attention to this significant but under-acknowledged Rancièrean force within British cultural studies (avant la lettre), but not just for the sake of it: it does so in order to offer counter-arguments and counter-positions for anyone seeking to contest or resist the stultifying tendencies within educational practices.

Sick man of transl-Asia: Bruce Lee and Rey Chow's queer cultural translation

This article examines the status of Bruce Lee films when they are approached as cultural translations; “translations”, however, that have no simple original. It does so in terms of Rey Chows proposed approach to cultural translation as set out in Primitive passions; firstly by indicating the constructed character of the simultaneously-produced Cantonese-language and English-language versions of the same films, and then by exploring some of the implications of the linguistic inconsistencies and semiotic play that is made apparent across the different audio and subtitling options made available by the DVD versions. As Chow has argued, various forms, sites and scenes of linguistic and cultural translation are often tense situations, in which the ethical and political stakes are high. So this article focuses on the treatment of linguistic, institutional and geographical “translation” within several Bruce Lee films themselves, as exemplified by the treatment of the regular stock figure of the treacherous/perverse translator. In so doing, the article argues for a relation between cultural translation and the “perverting” of established arrangements and values.

Reading Rey Chow

This article examines some key concerns and problematics that are regularly engaged in the work of Rey Chow, and relates them to the theoretical and political problematics of cultural studies as an ethico-political project. It associates Chows work with strong impulses and many of the abiding concerns that define the projects of such thinkers as Stuart Hall and Jacques Derrida, whilst also connecting her interventions to other key problematics in the fields of cultural studies, poststructuralist cultural theory and postcolonial studies. It shows that Chows work tests and explores political, theoretical and philosophical interpretive machines and positions by way of very close and yet wide-ranging readings of all manner of ‘objects’, unconstrained by contingent disciplinary demarcations (such as those between literature, media, popular culture, film, identity, and so on), in a way that reveals the complex discursive relations, reticulations, implicit and explicit interconnections between as well as gaps, hiatuses, aporias and barriers across putatively separate ‘realms’.

Rey Chow, postcoloniality and interdisciplinarity

The idea of a collection of essays focusing on the interdisciplinary contribution to postcolonial studies of the work of Rey Chow is likely to make immediate sense to readers of this journal. Many will consider the idea of a sustained engagement with the work of such a prominent thinker to be valid and timely as well as justified in its own right. Which is not to say that Chow’s work has an easily or clearly defined place within or in relation to the field(s) of postcolonial studies, of course; or that it is simply ‘understood’ as an agreed part of an accepted place of postcolonial studies. Indeed, her work*perhaps precisely because it is so interdisciplinary*offers distinct challenges to many established positions in and around postcolonial studies. This is not least because Chow’s work has such a complex and intimate awareness of and sensitivity to the intricacies of the interlinked problematics of class, feminism, ethnicity, history, translation, comparative work, poststructuralist theory, popular culture, literature, film and technology, in any cultural study. It is also because Chow’s readings are all informed by a sensitive and responsive awareness of the imbricated genealogies and lines of force that have constituted and structured these fields, and the often subterranean pressures and movements that condition and overdetermine such academic fields’ and other cultural discourses’ distances, relations, encounters, hybridizations, ruptures and consolidations. But overall, as more than one contributor to this collection makes clear, the challenges and values of Chow’s work arise because it has so comprehensive and active a relationship with the very activity of reading. As James Steintrager in this collection notes, the way that

Editorial: New research on Japanese Martial Arts

This editorial introduces this guest-edited special themed issue, which focuses on new research on the Japanese martial arts. This collection has been assembled by Michael Molasky from Waseda University, Tokyo, who convened a research group of innovative Japanese scholars to investigate questions of the global spread of Japanese martial arts. In this editorial, we limit ourselves to saying a few words about each contribution, considering some of their connections, and concluding with a reflection on what this special issue suggests to us about the current and future development of martial arts studies in Japan.

Making martial arts history matter

Abstract This paper examines key ways in which ideas such as ‘tradition’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘history’ are deployed in discourses around Asian martial arts. First introducing how such concepts are used in national contexts such as Korea and elsewhere in East Asia it then examines the case of a dispute between two English language writers on martial arts. It examines these different cases to illustrate the ways that ‘tradition’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘history’ can be deployed for different ideological ends, from nationalism to personal self-advancement, in different contexts. In doing so, the paper theorizes the consequences of antagonisms that have recently arisen between common beliefs about certain Asian martial arts and historical studies that challenge such beliefs. It concludes that the discursive status of ‘history’ is not fixed or permanent, but varies depending on context. This is the case to such an extent that the status of ‘history’ can be said to have changed decisively. Ultimately, the paper argues for the value of rigorous scholarship even when it runs counter to cultural beliefs, and highlights the significance of such scholarship for showing the ways in which martial arts history matters in more contexts and registers than martial arts alone.

Rey Chow and postcolonial social semiotics

This article is the Introduction to a special issue of Social Semiotics focusing on the work of Rey Chow, entitled “Rey Chow and Postcolonial Social Semiotics.” It introduces the issue through a consideration of the status of ethnicity and identity performativity in both popular culture and academic culture informed by the work of Rey Chow. It then discusses Chows key interventions, before introducing the work of the contributors to this collection.