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Those who have followed Rey Chow's work for a long time know that her work has always been one of provocation. These provocations include: subjecting modern Chinese literary and cultural productions to the analytical rigour of poststructuralist theory; coming to terms with the legacy of feminist film theory by addressing issues of cross-cultural contacts; expanding Western self-critique of modernity in the post-Enlightenment thinking of Adorno, Horkheimer and Foucault by considering the politics of visuality in modern warfare. Given the limited space here, I will mainly discuss some of Chow's key concepts where they appear in the Reader while pointing to her critiques of area studies and contributions to postcolonial theory and transcultural film studies.
The first excerpted reading comes from Chow's recent work on the convergence of area studies and the importation of French theory in America, a convergence that, she argues, must be understood within the significance of the dropping of the atomic bombs in the Asia-Pacific War. Chow critiques area studies in its formative years of the 1950s-60s as complicit with US Cold War policy in terms of "information retrieval" and managing knowledge of the "other" (p. 15). Building on Heidegger's theory of the world picture, Chow argues, "Supplementing Heidegger, we may say that in the age of bombing, the world has also been transformed into - what is essentially...