Rey Chow

Who is Rey Chow?

Rey Chow is a Chinese-American cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and film and postcolonial theory. Educated in Hong Kong and the United States, she has taught at several major American universities, including Brown University. Chow is currently Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University.

Chow's writing challenges assumptions in many different scholarly conversations including those about literature, film, visual media, sexuality and gender, postcolonialism, ethnicity, and cross-cultural politics. In the introduction to a collection of Rey Chow's essays, Chow scholar Paul Bowman emphasizes the direct heritage of Chow's work in the works of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, Laura Mulvey, and Teresa de Lauretis. Building on the work of these theorists, Chow explores the problematic assumptions about non-Western cultures and ethnic minorities within the context of academic discourse as well as in more public discourses about ethnic and cultural identity. Many of her explorations of critical concepts have been recognized by scholars as important, including her ideas about visualism, the ethnic subject and cultural translation.