Although the era of European colonialism has long passed,
misgivings about the inequality of the encounters between European
and non-European languages persist in many parts of the
postcolonial world. This unfinished state of affairs, this
lingering historical experience of being caught among unequal
languages, is the subject of Rey Chow's book. A diverse group of
personae, never before assembled in a similar manner, make their
appearances in the various chapters: the young mulatto happening
upon a photograph about skin color in a popular magazine; the man
from Martinique hearing himself named "Negro" in public in France;
call center agents in India trained to Americanize their accents
while speaking with customers; the Algerian Jewish philosopher
reflecting on his relation to the French language; African
intellectuals debating the pros and cons of using English for
purposes of creative writing; the translator acting by turns as a
traitor and as a mourner in the course of cross-cultural exchange;
Cantonese-speaking writers of Chinese contemplating the politics of
food consumption; radio drama workers straddling the forms of
traditional storytelling and mediatized sound broadcast.
In these riveting scenes of speaking and writing imbricated with
race, pigmentation, and class demarcations, Chow suggests,
postcolonial languaging becomes, de facto, an order of biopolitics.
The native speaker, the fulcrum figure often accorded a
transcendent status, is realigned here as the repository of
illusory linguistic origins and unities. By inserting British and
post-British Hong Kong (the city where she grew up) into the
languaging controversies that tend to be pursued in Francophone
(and occasionally Anglophone) deliberations, and by sketching the
fraught situations faced by those coping with the specifics of
using Chinese while negotiating with English, Chow not only
redefines the geopolitical boundaries of postcolonial inquiry but
also demonstrates how such inquiry must articulate historical
experience to the habits, practices, affects, and imaginaries based
in sounds and scripts.
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