Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience

Rey Chow

Published by Columbia University Press 2014

Not Like a Native Speaker

On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience

Rey Chow

https://doi.org/10.7312/chow15144

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

A riveting series of stories that portray the biopolitics of speaking and writing in a postcolonial world.

Author / Editor information

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

Andrea Riemenschnitter:
[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.

Roland Greene, Stanford 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.

Simon Gikandi, Princeton University:
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.

Smaro Kamboureli, Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature, University of Toronto:
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.

Panivong Norindr, University of Southern California:
May become one of the classic texts of Anglophone postcolonial studies.

Zahid R. Chaudhary, Princeton University:
A critically important and intellectually exciting contribution to debates concerning voice and language in postcolonial studies.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Note on Non-English Sources Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xiii
INTRODUCTION: SKIN TONES–ABOUT LANGUAGE, POSTCOLONIALITY, AND RACIALIZATION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. DERRIDA’S LEGACY OF THE MONOLINGUAL Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
2. NOT LIKE A NATIVE SPEAKER: THE POSTCOLONIAL SCENE OF LANGUAGING AND THE PROXIMITY OF THE XENOPHONE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	35
3. TRANSLATOR, TRAITOR; TRANSLATOR, MOURNER (OR, DREAMING OF INTERCULTURAL EQUIVALENCE) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	61
4. THINKING WITH FOOD, WRITING OFF CENTER: THE POSTCOLONIAL WORK OF LEUNG PING-KWAN AND MA KWOK-MING Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	79
5. THE SOUNDS AND SCRIPTS OF A HONG KONG CHILDHOOD Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Edition: Pilot project. eBook available to selected US libraries only
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 192

eBook

Published: September 23, 2014
ISBN: 9780231522717