Those who have followed Rey Chow's work for a long time know that her work has always been one of provocation. These provocations include: subjecting modern Chinese literary and cultural productions to the analytical rigour of poststructuralist theory; coming to terms with the legacy of feminist film theory by addressing issues of cross-cultural contacts; expanding Western self-critique of modernity in the post-Enlightenment thinking of Adorno, Horkheimer and Foucault by considering the politics of visuality in modern warfare. Given the limited space here, I will mainly discuss some of Chow's key concepts where they appear in the Reader while pointing to her critiques of area studies and contributions to postcolonial theory and transcultural film studies.

The first excerpted reading comes from Chow's recent work on the convergence of area studies and the importation of French theory in America, a convergence that, she argues, must be understood within the significance of the dropping of the atomic bombs in the Asia-Pacific War. Chow critiques area studies in its formative years of the 1950s–60s as complicit with US Cold War policy in terms of “information retrieval” and managing knowledge of the “other” (p. 15). Building on Heidegger's theory of the world picture, Chow argues, “Supplementing Heidegger, we may say that in the age of bombing, the world has also been transformed into – what is essentially conceived and grasped as – a target” (p. 8). From this introductory excerpt, Bowman then organizes the essays by way of part one, which showcases Chow's interventions in postcolonial theory and ethnicity, and part two, which illustrates her cross-cultural approaches to film studies.

Chow's critiques of Sinology and area studies in her earlier writings engage with issues in cultural legitimation, especially in the wake of postcolonial theory's institutionalization as legitimate scholarly inquiry after the 1978 publication of Said's Orientalism. Chow shows that Sinologists like Stephen Owen, who claims that Chinese poetry loses true national identity when it becomes “supremely translatable” to Western readers, are actually participating “within a type of discourse that is geographically deterministic and hence culturally essentialist” (p. 35). To combat this desire for nativism, she urges Sinologists and specialists not to reject Said's project as non-applicable to East Asia. It must be stressed that at the same time that Chow was writing about the urgency to put questions of Orientalism on the map of East Asian studies, similar ambitious research agendas were also taking place. For example, the inaugural issue of the East Asian cultural studies journal Positions in the Fall of 1993 was titled “Colonial Modernity”; its contributors, Tani Barlow, Wang Hui, Lydia Liu and others, are by now the most productive scholars working on questions of translation, colonialism and semi-colonialism.

Bowman does an excellent job of collecting essays by Chow that most powerfully highlight her key concepts. Specifically, “the politics of admittance” refers to how racialized female sexuality constitutes a fundamental power struggle within the context of colonialism, especially in the texts of Frantz Fanon. Chow argues that if for Fanon his ambivalent racial status limits the kind of white colonial community that would admit him as a member, women of colour in his own communities are often given a kind of negative and sexualized “agency” through their condemned power of miscegenation with the white men. Chow concludes: “The ultimate danger posed by the Negress and the mulatto is hence not their sexual behaviour per se, but the fact that their sexual agency carries with it a powerful (re)conceptualization of community—of community as based on difference, heterogeneity, creolization” (p. 71). As evident here, Chow's whole intellectual project displays consistent attempts to understand how “impure” subject positions may challenge and interrupt existing conceptions of community.

Thinking through impurity is relevant to her other key concepts like “ethnic spectatorship” and “autoethnography” in her efforts to read Chinese films and transcultural politics otherwise. Ethnic spectatorship is more than just revising Mulvey's feminist film theory by adding ethnicity; it has to do with a profound sense of ambivalence and complicity when an ethnic person, upon seeing a Westerner's production about China like Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, identifies herself with the narrative image and praises the film: “I'd say, he did a good job!” (p. 113). The concept of “autoethnography” supplements “ethnic spectatorship” by pointing to the partial agency that Chinese filmmakers (especially Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige) possess when they begin to exhibit and sometimes exotically “anthropologize” their cultures to the world at large (p. 153).

In the wake of Chow's strong critiques of area studies' and China studies' complicity with the reductionist method of “information retrieval,” engaged readers in related fields can observe growing intellectual interests in bridging the gaps and disciplinary mistrust between cultural studies, area studies and comparative literature in recent years. Specifically, Gayatri Spivak in Death of a Discipline points out that “Comparative Literature and Area Studies can work together” by energizing the old European model of comparative literature with deep trainings of languages of the Global South (Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 15). In Asia as Method, Taiwan-based theorist Kuan-Hsing Chen also calls for an alert diagnosis and critique of desire for subimperialism, which is emanating from industrially advanced states without real military power in East Asia (e.g. Taiwan) towards Southeast Asia in terms of economic neocolonialism (Duke University Press, 2010). It remains to be seen whether Chow will take up these newly formed intellectual discourses on collaboration between area studies and disciplines that were formerly suspicious of its methodologies.