Description
The young mulatto chancing upon a photo about skin color; the man from Martinique hearing himself named "Negro" in France; Indian call center agents learning to Americanize their accents; the Algerian Jewish philosopher reflecting on his relation to the French language; African intellectuals debating the use of English; the translator acting as a traitor and a mourner in cross-cultural exchange; Cantonese-speaking writers of Chinese contemplating food consumption; radio drama workers straddling the forms of traditional storytelling and mediatized sound broadcast: drawing on these and other personae, Rey Chow depicts riveting scenes of postcolonial languaging imbricated with race, class, and biopolitical demarcations. The native speaker, the fulcrum figure often accorded a transcendent status, is realigned here as the repository of illusory linguistic origins and unities. Articulating historical experience to practices and affects based in sounds and scripts, this book definitively transforms the basic parameters of postcolonial inquiry.
About the Author
Rey Chow is Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University and the author of numerous influential books, including several published by Columbia University Press: Primitive Passions; The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism; and Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films. A book about her writings, The Rey Chow Reader, was edited by Paul Bowman. Her work has appeared in more than ten languages.
Reviews
A critically important and intellectually exciting contribution to debates concerning voice and language in postcolonial studies. -- Zahid R. Chaudhary, Princeton University May become one of the classic texts of Anglophone postcolonial studies. -- Panivong Norindr, University of Southern California Not Like a Native Speaker reads like a great novel. Through a dazzling array of historical and contemporary scenes, Rey Chow makes yet another invaluable contribution to postcolonial and diaspora studies, this time by taking on the vexing, yet hugely important, issue of "languaging," the racialization of bodies via the loss of native languages or accented speech. She examines the losses and affects that befall subjects who find themselves in the interstices of unequal languages and political economies with the same unflinching honesty and intellectual rigor that her scholarship has accustomed us to. -- Smaro Kamboureli, Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature, University of Toronto Rey Chow's book Not Like a Native Speaker is not only a brilliant and original reflection on the fate of language in the afterlife of colonialism, but also an authoritative statement on postcolonial theory; moving beyond the confinement of the politics of identity, it provides a unique map for the postcolonial criticism of the future, one informed by rigor and unafraid of judgment. -- Simon Gikandi, Princeton University How does colonial power deploy language?-a central question in postcolonial studies-is infused with new life by Rey Chow in this dazzling book. Chow poses other searching questions concerning identity and estrangement, memory and oblivion, bilingualism and aphasia, and offers acute discussions of language in Fanon, Benjamin, Derrida, Achebe, and Ngugi. Not Like a Native Speaker is provocative and indispensable. -- Roland Greene, Stanford University [Not Life a Native Speaker] offers new, thought-provoking insights into the social effects engendered by imperialism and the rapid development of new communication technologies. -- Andrea Riemenschnitter Modern Chinese Literature and Culture
Book Information
ISBN 9780231151450
Author Rey Chow
Format Paperback
Page Count 192
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press