Fliehende Objekte: Rey Chows Beiträge zur postkolonialen Theorie

Based on her sharp, cutting-edge analyses of a wide range of theoretical and aesthetic texts, Rey Chow deconstructs the ideological surface of the world's configuration of political power structures and social processes under the global neoliberal capitalist world order. In particular, her attention is directed to the objects of aesthetic reflection, which according to her reside both within and beyond the film, literary text, or work of art. Lost, found or fleeting, these objects ground human consciousness and are a major constitutive of cultural memory, knowledge production, and creativity. Her work includes analyses of the interventions of postcolonial intellectuals, who after decades of anticolonial struggles still find themselves confronted with the West's colonial-imperialist attitudes, policies and poetics. Studying the objects of postcolonial world-making, Chow concentrates on the peripheries and contact zones, where ethnic inequalities cannot fully be hidden underneath glossy transcultural fassades. In order to shed light on the unintended side effects of western universalizing theories, she scrutinizes the displaced meanings of widely used concepts such as language, translation, mimesis, melancholy, visuality, or entanglement when applied in postcolonial aesthetic contexts. New meanings are unearthed from modernist, post-colonial, post-structuralist and other theories when shifted onto the plane of alternative models of worlding and community formation in sinophone writers' and film directors' works

Unleashing the Sounds of Silence: Hong Kong’s Story in Troubled Times

Hong Kong’s story is difficult to tell, commented Leung Ping-kwan (1949–2013) in consideration of the city’s complicated historical configuration as well as the aesthetic reflection on the same by the writers and artists that have come to shape and promote the colonial city’s unique culture. Confronting the post-handover government’s suppression of democratic decision-making with massive street protests, the next generation of cultural producers continues to critically interrogate, contest, and subvert the official genealogy and nationalist master narrative. In response to the various factors contributing to the ongoing silencing of the city’s critical voices, many artists, directors, and writers have turned to (absent) sound as the aesthetic signifier of the sociopolitical turn from hope and reconciliation to despair. Their performative silence simultaneously protests and mourns the denunciation, suppression, and erasure of oppositional groups. In this paper, I apply a methodological cluster comprising concepts from ecocriticism, microhistorical-discourse analysis, social anthropology, and other disciplinary fields to address the ramifications of Hong Kong’s story as inscribed within protest-related literary and visual and multimedia art productions. Street art performance, handover-themed art exhibitions, Wong King Fai’s video “Umbrella Dance for Hong Kong,” and Samson Young’s sonic multimedia installations appositely illustrate the conundrum addressed

Ein Fall für die Bühne: Guo Shixings Drama "Die Vogelliebhaber" zwischen Traditionsanschluss und Globalisierung

The Western heritage of an Asian cultural modernity is no longer reflected as a dominant trend by contemporary sinophone avantgarde playwrights. Rather, it has become a borrowed tradition to be reconciled, or renegotiated, with local theatrical forms and styles. In his play Niaoren (Bird Men, 1992), Beijing-based dramatist Guo Shixing stages the uncanny re-enactment of colonialism’s missionary zeal in the guise of an Asian-American psychoanalyst’s project of scientific human engineering in post-Dengist China. Unlike the Christian missionaries’ peer group, it does not take the urban bird lovers and amateur singers of Beijing Opera long to see through the self-deceptive manoeuvring of their would-be master. In a wildly comical counter-performance, they enact the court trial scene from a well-known traditional play, thus efficiently holding their ground against several self-appointed, alien saviours of the local soul