Keynote

Dr. Rey Chow

Rey Chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University. She is the author of many books, including _Woman and Chinese Modernity (1991); _Writing Diaspora (1993); _Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema_ (1995); _Ethics after Idealism (1998); _The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism_ (2002); _The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work_ (2006); and Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films_ (2007). She has edited the collection _Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field_ (2000). Her book _Primitive Passions_ received the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. Her work has been widely anthologized and translated into major European and Asian languages. More information on Dr. Chow can be obtained from her Brown University website http://research.brown.edu/myresearch/Rey_Chow

"How Critical Thinking Becomes Obscene"

This lecture is a small part of a longer project on the status of theory as we find it today, in the aftermath of the heyday of theory. Defining theory as reflexivity, the project begins by returning to an earlier, high modernist moment – Walter Benjamin’s study of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater – to spell out the ramifications of these two thinkers’ anti-identificatory, inter-medial emphases.  As constituted by such emphases, reflexivity becomes increasingly inseparable from a self-conscious type of performativity, which has since spread across diverse venues of knowledge production and critique, including ideology, literary criticism, and feminist film studies. Displaced from the “deep” emotions and thoroughly mediatized, reflexivity, it seems, tends more and more toward the extreme and  toward violence. It is in such a context that the obscene or the pornographic, arguably, has become a method of critical reading, even though the exact locations at which the obscene or the pornographic appears may still surprise us.