Description
Book SynopsisA riveting series of stories that portray the biopolitics of speaking and writing in a postcolonial world.
Trade ReviewA critically important and intellectually exciting contribution to debates concerning voice and language in postcolonial studies. -- Zahid R. Chaudhary, Princeton University May become one of the classic texts of Anglophone postcolonial studies. -- Panivong Norindr, University of Southern California 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. -- Smaro Kamboureli, Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature, University of Toronto 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. -- Simon Gikandi, Princeton 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. -- Roland Greene, Stanford University [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. -- Andrea Riemenschnitter Modern Chinese Literature and Culture
Table of ContentsNote on Non-English Sources Acknowledgments Introduction: Skin Tones-About Language, Postcoloniality, and Racialization 1. Derrida's Legacy of the Monolingual 2. Not Like a Native Speaker: The Postcolonial Scene of Languaging and the Proximity of the Xenophone 3. Translator, Traitor; Translator, Mourner (or, Dreaming of Intercultural Equivalence) 4. Thinking with Food, Writing off Center: The Postcolonial Work of Leung Ping-kwan and Ma Kwok-ming 5. The Sounds and Scripts of a Hong Kong Childhood Notes Index
