Beauregard, Guy

English

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Book Reviews Rey Chow. Ethics After Idealism: Theory—Culture—Ethnicity—Reading. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1 9 9 8 . Pp. xxiii, 2 3 5 . $ 2 9 . 9 5 , $ :4-95 P D-Rey Chow is among the most compelling cultural critics writing in English. Her previous books, including Woman and Chinese Modernity ( 1 9 9 1 ) and Writing Diaspora ( 1 9 9 3 ) , take on large issues with bold and often unpredictable argumentative turns that consistently challenge received truisms about theory, ethnicity, and the nature of postcolonial resistance. Woman and Chinese Modernity, for instance, sets out to criti-cize "both the hegemonic status of Western theoretical thinking and the entrenched ways of interpretation in the field of Chinese litera-ture" (xii), while Writing Diaspora challenges the way scholars in the West participate in "a circuit of productivity that draws its capital from others' deprivation while refusing to acknowledge its own presence as endowed" ( 1 4 ) . The polemical tone that characterizes Chow's argu-ments makes her work provocative if not controversial: readers of ARIEL may recall Chow's article "The Fascist Longings in Our Midst" ( 1 9 9 5 ) , where she connects multicultural imperatives to the fascism of the 1 9 2 0 s and 1930s: "In the white liberal enthusiasm for 'people of colour' that is currently sweeping through North American academic circles, something of the fascism we witnessed in earlier decades has made its return in a new guise. The basis for this fascism is, once again, the identification with an idealized other placed in the position of un-questionable authority" (41 ). Such concerns are at the center of Chow's latest book, Ethics After Idealism ( i g g 8 ) , which reprints "The Fascist Longings in Our Midst" along with nine other articles that were previously published between 1 9 9 2 and 1 9 9 7 . In these chapters and the first-rate Introduction, Chow addresses the politics of otherness, or more precisely, what she calls the idealizing of otherness. Her search for an "ethics after idealism" attempts to formulate a mode of criticism that doggedly follows the traces of "idealism" that she argues characterize contemporary cul-tural studies, not in order to make a complete break with such traces but rather to question their institutional and social implications. ARIEL: A Review of international English Literature, 29:3 , July 1998 184 B O O K R E V I E W S Chow's search takes her through institutional politics of theory and cultural studies in the US academy; the work of key thinkers including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Slavojiek, and Frantz Fanon; film versions of Asian American works such as Ai. Butterfly, and The Joy Luck Club (the latter compared with the film Jurassic Park); the significance of "endurance" in Zhang Yimou's film To Live; and the particular and of-ten ignored postcolonial status of Hong Kong, Rev Chow's place of birth. Such a synopsis of the book mav hint at the range of materials Chow-draws upon to make her arguments, but it cannot convey the fine ar-gumentative turns through which she takes us through such terrain. The best examples of such turns occur in the Introduction and Chap-ter One, where Chow begins with the question why are the most stri-dent critics of "cultural studies" the very same scholars who advocated poststructuralist "theory" in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her re-sponse is as follows: Cul tura l studies, bv its dogged turns toward the other not only within lan-guage and text but also outside language and text, i n effect forces poststruc-turalist theory to confront the significance o f race—and with it the histories of racial d iscr iminat ion and racial exploitat ion — that is repressed in post-structuralist theory's c la im to subversiveness and radicalism. By do ing so, cultural studies challenges poststructuralist theory's own position as the "other" of Europe, as the "other" within the European tradition. (5) Chow is not content, however, at stopping with such a remarkable point. She moves from this critique of poststructuralist theoiy to an equally incisive critique of scholars working in "area studies," who use "culture" and appeals to "specificity" to ignore the implications of "theory." As Chow writes, "at academic conferences and research gath-erings as well as in print, very conservative practitioners of area studies can now safely endow their own retrograde positions with the glorious multiculturalist aura of defending non-Western traditions" ( 1 0 ) . The breadth and rigour of Chow's argument here make her work indispen-sable reading for anyone concerned with the academic politics of "oth-erness" in the 1990s. Perhaps no part of Chow's book is more significant than Chapter Two, the reprinted version of "The Fascist Longings in Our Midst." The chapter begins with an extended discussion of what Chow calls fascism's "technologized idealism" ( 1 4 ) in relation to various notions of "projection." The big turn in Chow's argument, however, occurs when she connects her discussion of fascism with a fictional scenario, which Chow calls "The Story of O, or, the New Fascism." Chow's sce-nario features a "person of color" from a "third world" country faking her way through graduate school in the US, and, by narrating such a story, Chow attempts to "deconstruct our increasingly fascistic intellec-tual environment, in which facile attitudes, pretentious credentials, and irresponsible work habits can be fostered in the name of 'cultural pluralism'" ( 2 8 ) . B O O K R E V I E W S 185 While the shocking nature of Chow's argument is surely intended as a wake-up call, I find myself agreeing with Neil ten Kortenaar when he questions its logical soundness by pointing out that "cultural plural-ism, for all its sins, does not kill people" ( 3 2 ) . And while Chow's argu-ment is clearly directed at the cultural politics of the US academy, I find myself wondering how it might make sense in Canada, which is where I live and work. Academia in Canada, to the best of my knowl-edge, is not being overrun by people of colour faking their way through the system. More pertinent, perhaps, is the currency attached to idealizing otherness as object of analysis in postcolonial studies in Canada. To take Chow's argument seriously might entail rethinking how idealizing otherness as object of analysis has worked to deflect at-tention away from questions of access and the distribution of cultural capital in Canadian universities. To put the matter bluntly, I know of far more studies of "Native literature" in Canada than I know of Native people with access to the cultural capital necessary to secure an aca-demic position. So when Chow asks her key question "Does 'otherness' itself automatically suffice as critical intervention?" ( 3 0 ) , it befits her readers to consider its broadest implications, for while Chow's argu-ment in its narrow sense is possible to dismiss, in its broad sense it hits very close to home indeed. ' G U Y B E A U R E G A R D W O R K S C I T E D C h o w , R e y . " T h e F a s c i s t L o n g i n g s i n O u r M i d s t . " Postcolonialism and its Discon-tents. ARIEL 26.1 (1995): 23-50. . Woman and Chinese Modernity. The Politics of Reading between West and East. M i n n e s o t a : U o f M i n n e s o t a P, 1991. . Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. A r t s a n d P o l i t i c s o f t h e E v e r y d a y . B l o o m i n g t o n : I n d i a n a U P , 1993. t e n K o r t e n a a r , N e i l . R e v . o f ARIEL'S s p e c i a l i ssue Postcolonialism and its Discon-tents. E d . P a m e l a M c C a l l u m e t a l . Chimo: The Newsjournal of the Canadian Asso-ciation for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 33 (1996): 29-33. George, Rosemary Marangoly. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Reloca-tions and Twentieth-Century Fiction. New York: Cambridge UP, 1 9 9 6 . Pp. ix, 2 6 5 . $ 4 9 . 9 5 . In The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction, Rosemary Marangoly George analyzes the home as a concep-tual object, and she uses this analysis to develop a broad and original study of twentieth-century literature. George's central organizing idea is that the "search for the location in which the self is 'at home'" has been "one of the primary projects of twentieth-century fiction in Eng-lish" ( 3 ) . Specifically, the home plays a crucial role in the development 

Rey Chow. Ethics After Idealism: Theory—Culture—Ethnicity—Reading.

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Rey Chow. Ethics After Idealism: Theory—Culture—Ethnicity—Reading.

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