Rey Chow is an acclaimed critical theorist and cultural critic who holds the position of Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Duke University, where she was a former director of the Program in Literature. Since 1991 she has authored ten monographs on literature, film, and cultural and representational politics pertaining to modern China and East Asia, Western Europe, and North America. Her writings are widely anthologized and translated, appearing in numerous Asian and European languages. Her new book, A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present, draws on Foucault’s definition of “outside” in order to address in-depth the plight and potentiality of the humanities in the age of global finance and neoliberal mores.
Tell us a little bit about your book.
This book is a sustained critical reflection on the current situation of humanistic studies in the English-speaking North American academy. The famous writings of Michel Foucault are used to pose questions about the humanities’ crisis and potentiality, though the book is not a study exclusively of Foucault’s ideas. In all my previous work, I have drawn attention to the aesthetics and politics of representational forms, including fiction, poetry, film, comics, and sound. This book continues that larger research project (e. g. by looking at Foucault’s writings on modern artists such as Manet and Magritte; Foucault’s conceptual affinities with theories of acousmatic sound; Foucault’s writings on language and literary discourse), but it also goes beyond the specifics of separate representational realms to emphasize the general predicament caused by neoliberal market economics for humanistic inquiry at an everyday pedagogical level. This latter issue has wide-ranging implications for contemporary society: are we a society that can or is ready to dispense with humanistic knowledge simply because it does not yield immediate practical solutions or material results? Is a form of intellectual work that specializes in the techniques of critical reflection and analysis superfluous, pointless even, in a world driven by the mechanisms of global finance, identity populism, and market-oriented moralism? If the answers to these questions are negative, as I believe they should be, what spaces can we create and maintain for humanistic inquiry without simply turning such inquiry into a subsidiary of other, solution-oriented fields of knowledge, the kinds that tend to command social approval and philanthropic investment these days, including within the institutional setting of the corporate university?
How do you relate your work to other well-known philosophies?
Obviously, I have been deeply influenced by twentieth-century French-language philosophers such as Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, and some of their forbears. The imprint of Nietzsche on my work is strong and I have also learned from readings of Marx, Freud, and Heidegger. Because I am not a philosopher by training, there is inevitably something amateurish in the way I reference these authors but perhaps that is not necessarily a bad thing. For me, these well-known philosophers are a splendid resource for critical thinking: their writings offer elaborations of secular modes of rationalization that I find helpful when coming to terms with the representational aesthetics and politics that characterize modern and postcolonial times. At the same time, what these philosophers’ works highlight are certain epistemological limits and unresolvable questions. These limits and questions are often unsettling and thus generative in thought-provoking ways.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
Having served as a department chair for a number of years, I have had the opportunity to observe the work of the university from a perspective beyond teaching classes, mentoring students, and socializing with colleagues. This perspective is, of course, rather limited, though it has alerted me to the financial, operational, and ethical premises on which a corporate enterprise is run. Above all, I became more aware of the rationalizations of accountability that have to play alongside the daily functions of the institution. Foucault’s work on governmentality, on the evolution of population management techniques, on racism, and on the legacy of Western Christendom has much to offer us in such a university setting, even as his ideas have often been popularized in more superficial ways. By writing this book, I hope that I am offering my students an example of responsible scholarly undertaking and an antidote to the more facile and cynical discourses of identity politics that so saturate their educational environment today.
In what way does your work stand in contrast to the ideology of identity politics? How can Foucault’s work help us think more critically about the way we approach challenges facing educational institutions?
Let me draw readers’ attention in particular to the introduction and chapter 3 of the book. In the introduction, I discuss the organizational logics and politics typical of the global corporate university, where the pursuit of more traditional, formal disciplines such as Philosophy, History, Classics, and English usually proceeds these days alongside identity studies and area studies. Identity Studies pertains to the interests of women, LGBT, transgender, disabled, indigenous, and other politicized populations, while Area Studies pertains to various geopolitical regions of the world whose importance has been defined in relation to postwar U. S. foreign policy. I argue that, if we follow Foucault’s analyses of social processes of norming, of institutions’ self-regulating discourses of accountability, and of historically evolving devices of governmentality, we will have to see that Identity Studies and Area Studies are made to perform the tasks of risk management and damage control in the university setting, where they provide a kind of sanitation service for the depraved, guilt-ridden Western soul. In other words, how is a university curriculum supposed to function when one part of the humanities is supposed to clean up the “filth” of the other (the more traditional, formal disciplines), and for whose benefit? In chapter 3, I discuss how Edward Said’s criticism of Orientalism has so powerfully shaped the direction of postcolonial studies that it has sometimes led to a less-than nuanced representation of non-Western cultures, which are simply assumed to occupy an oppositional stance vis-a-vis the West. In such a context, I argue for a more careful reading of Foucault’s discussions of race and racism, which are part and parcel of his longstanding critique of modern European political reason. For Foucault, racism is a kind of governing mechanism that erupts from within (rather than outside) the social fabric; racism is thus inseparable from class stratifications. These are precious lessons to keep in mind as we challenge the ideology of identity politics currently permeating our educational institutions.
I should add that being a nonwhite author, often though not exclusively working on Asia and the postcolonial world, has sensitized me to such ideology. Regardless of what I write or say as a scholar, I have noticed that my work tends to be read in a certain predictable way, probably because of a routine racial identity stereotyping even in the context of a largely progressive academy. This racial identity stereotyping, a process of interpellating and rewarding minority subjects, is what I have analyzed in detail as “coercive mimeticism” in my earlier book The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?
I find most exciting the sections of my book that explore notions of the norm in Foucault, the controversy over critique, the debates about race and race studies, the ramifications of acousmatic listening, and the epistemological career trajectory I plot from what Foucault calls the “confessing animal” to what I name as the “smartself.” I also love Foucault’s writings on modern art, and hope that my discussion conveys a sense of that excitement.
How have readers responded? (Or how do you hope they will respond?)
Since the book’s release in late March 2021, its chapters have already been presented and discussed at a number of forums in Canada and the U. S. Readers have responded with tremendous enthusiasm and posed very engaging questions. I have also received highly positive feedback from individual readers in Asia and North America. Plans to translate one chapter from the book into German are underway with a leading German academic journal.
Interested in reading A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present? Customers in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, East Asia, United Kingdom, Europe, Africa, Middle East, South Asia, South Africa and most of Latin America who purchase the book through the Columbia University Press website receive a 20% discount off the price of the book by using the promo code CUP20.
You can ask Rey Chow questions about her work in the comments section below. Comments must conform to our community guidelines and comment policy.
*
The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.
Rey Chow
Rey Chow is an acclaimed critical theorist and cultural critic who holds the position of Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Duke University, where she was a former director of the Program in Literature. Since 1991 she has authored ten monographs on literature, film, and cultural and representational politics pertaining to modern China and East Asia, western Europe, and North America. Her writings are widely anthologized and translated, and have appeared in numerous Asian and European languages.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
