Chow

Relevant Work
 Pages
(NATC, 3rd ed.)

## Biography

* Born 1957 in Hong Kong to Muslim parents
* Earned B.A. From the University of Hong Kong in 1979 where she received what she describes as a “classical colonial education,” focusing on the English language and literature.
* Earned an M.A. in 1982 and a PhD in 1986 from Stanford UNiversity
* Taught Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota from 1987-1992, became a Professor of Comp Lit at the University of California, Irvine in 1992.
* Was appointed the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University from 2000-2009, and was appointed the Anne Firor Scott Professor and Director of the Program in Literature at Duke University in 2010.

## From *Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility* (2007)

### **Background and Historical Context**

* As a postcolonial theorist, Chow offers critiques of Orientalism, racism, and sexism that draw on Marxist, deconstructive, and feminist theories (NATC 2469).
* *Sentimental Fabulations* explores the group of Chinese filmmakers that helped to bring Chinese filmaking out of the art house and towards a more global audience after the privatization of the previously state-owned film industry—the so-called Fifth Generation filmmakers of mainland China, the Taiwanese New Wave, and Hong Kong Second Wave filmmakers.

### **Key Terms**

**Male Gaze -** Coined by Laura Mulvey, the term refers to how cinema tends to portray the world from a patriarchal point of view, resulting in a fetishization of the on-screen image. This necessitates a mistrust of the portrayal. Chow argues that due to Mulvey’s work, the door was opened in film theory to do similar theoretical work for other (not only feminist), underrepresented groups.

**The** **Sentimental -** Chow defines this as “the persistence of predominant affective mode.” It tends to manifest as an apparent excess of emotion, but Chow argues that it is “only a clue to a much broader range of issues” (NATC 2480-2481).

**Global Visualization -** The process by which a culture becomes a globally traded commodity as they export their culture in an effort to gain a more visible position on the global stage. This usually means the exaggeration or condensing of a culture’s nuance.

### **Key Quotations**

* ”Where is the movie about me? . . . Questions of becoming visible pertain, of course, to the prevalence of the politics of identification, to the relation between representational forms and their articulation of subjective histories and locations“ (NATC 2471).
* “Whereas feminist critics, following Mulvey, elaborate and refine women-centered modes of interrogating patriarchy, other critics, equipped with other types of social queries, would complicate the differential between gaze and image in terms of class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexual preference in order to expose the repressive effects of dominant modes of visuality and identification. [. . .] Concurrently, they also theorize the ambiguities inherent in various forms of spectatorship and, by implication, in various forms of seeing and subjectivity” (NATC 2475).
* “One cannot help feeling that a certain predictability has set in and that, despite their local differences, the theoretical moves made by different cultural groups vis-a-vis the cinematic image often share a similar kind of critical prerogative” (NATC 2475).
* “There is a visibility of visibility—a visibility that is the condition of possibility for what becomes visible, that may derive a certain intelligibility from the latter but cannot be simply reduced to it” (NATC 2477).
* “As much as belonging in the history of Chinese culture, the films involved should also, I contend, be seen as belonging in the history of Western cinema studies, in the same manner that modern Asia, Africa, and Latin America, properly speaking, belong in the history of modern European studies” (NATC 2478).
* “Sentimentalism, rather than designating the passing of time or the melancholy sensitivity of a lone lyric consciousness, becomes instead a vindicated instrument in (the reinterpretation of) social entanglements, often providing new clues as to who is actually in control” (NATC 2482).
* “How can the symptoms of prominent affective tendencies, as detectable in certain films, be theorized in relation to the foundations arid practices·pf,social interaction” (NATC2483)?
* “The term *wenqing zhuyi—*literally, "warm sentiment-ism"—seems to me to shed light on something unique to the Chinese discursive constellation. [. . .] Being warm, to be exact, is being in the middle between the extreme of hot and cold, bespeaking a kind of moderation that is, interestingly, not quite the affective outpour that is the typical definition of sentimentalism. [. . .] This alternative emphasis on being moderate, which readily translates into affiliate notions of being mild, tender, tolerant, obliging, and forbearing, was the reason *wenqing zhuyi* used to be targeted for criticism as bourgeois ideology by the Chinese communists. *Wenqing* was suspect because it signals an accepting attitude that is the opposite of a clear-cut determination to reject and expel (NATC 2483).
* “The sentimental is ultimately about being accommodating and being accommodated, about the delineation and elaboration of a comfortable/homely interiority, replete with the implications of exclusion that such delineation and elaboration by necessity entail. Accordingly, what is excluded, what is banished to the outside, is believed to be antagonistic, dangerous, and evil” [. . .] The gravest problems arise, of course, when the homely—what is inside—too, is revealed to be oppressive and unbearable—indeed, uninhabitable“ (NATC 2484).
* “It is possible to argue that at the heart of Chinese sentimentalism lies the idealization of filiality: as a predominant mode ofsubjectivization, filial piety is not simply a matter of respecting one's biological or cultural elders but also an age-old moral apparatus for, interpellating individuals into the hierarchy-conscious conduct of identifying with—and submitting to—whatever preexists them—from the ancestral family to the ancestral land, the province, the country, and the ethnic community, in a foreign nation—as authoritative and thus beyond challenge” (NATC 2485).
* “More than simply a matter of excavating historical layers of meaning embedded in cinematic images, what I would like to get at is the process in which this second, epistemic sense of visibility—that is, a trajectory of objectification, recognition, and khowledge that may be made palpable by visual objects such as filmic images but cannot in the end be reduced to them—materializes not only in relation to the visible that is the images but also in the very sentimental interstices—the remains of a collective cultural scaffold—that lend the images their support” (NATC 2486-2487).

### **Discussion**

* ”Chow describes the relationship of Chinese films not only to the ongoing and dynamic development of Chinese culture but, to the complexities of intercultural exchange in an age of global media” (NATC 2469).
* Chow argues that Western theorists must move away from the idea of “Asianness” to understand the commodification of Chinese culture through it’s visualization not only in movies, but also a whole list of other ”contemporary media discourses.” This list includes: cuisine, herbal medicine, spiritual and physical excercise, sex trade, femal child adoption, model minority politics, and others “that are at once sustained by and contributing to the flows of capital” (NATC 2478).
* Chow argues that in Chinese film—rather than representing a naive excess of emotion, “an effeminacy and sensationalism,” as some theorists have said about Western film—“the sentimental” demonstrates the complexity and nuance of “society’s moral duplicity” (NATC 2482-2483).
* Chow does not simply seek to criticize the sentimental as an ideological apparatus for manipulating a population, but rather to address how the sentimental operates in the negotiations of identity and how it “tangentially or even unnoticeably, signal[s] possibilities for perversion, subversion, and diversion (NATC 2485-2486).

## Bibliography

* *Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East* (1991)
* *Writing Diaspora: Tactices of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies* (1993)
* *Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (*1995)
* *Ethics after Idealism: Theory--Culture--Ethnicity--Reading* (1998)
* *Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field* (2000)
* *The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism* (2002)
* *The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work* (2006)
* *Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture* (2012)
* *Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility* (2007)
* *Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience* (2014)

## References

* *The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism*. 3rd ed., W.W. Norton & Co., 2018.