Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture

“Whatever concepts Rey Chow writes about, whether it is capture, the postcolonial, or sacrifice, she always manages to produce a positive sense about them. Not ‘positive’ in the convention of spin that nowadays supports almost every cultural event or object; Chow is positive because she intelligently entangles each of her concepts with ideas that one may not expect to find together, thereby producing a kind of dynamic surprise: pornography and reflexivity, or mimesis and victimhood, are good examples. Chow’s book, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (2012), is an uplifting experience.” - Greg Wilding, M/C Reviews: Culture and the Media
"Few authors master the art of enticing readers with imaginative titles, and then fulfill their promises. Few manage to make a collection of disparate essays more attractive than a monograph. There is nothing really disparate, since Rey Chow is in the middle of it all. And she knows so much, and brings it all together: modernism, art, transnationalism, philosophy—she makes it all coherent and important. At the heart of the book is an ongoing, labyrinthine, but deeply engaging discussion and demonstration of montage—cutting and re-assembling as an aesthetic and ethical principle; the one through the other, and back."—Mieke Bal, author of Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo's Political Art
"In Rey Chow's own terms, entanglements are 'the linkages and enmeshments that keep things apart; the voidings and uncoverings that hold things together.' Chow's entanglements are prefaced by her rare command of and facility with the literature of contemporary critical theory. In turning her incisive scrutiny to a broad range of contemporary artifacts, she exemplifies the currency of theoretical rigor amid cultural conditions of radical new alignments and medial reconfigurations."—Henry Sussman, author of Around the Book: Systems and Literacy
"Rey Chow is a superb stager of theoretical scenes. To see the film Lust, Caution, for example, grow ever more radiant as it is approached through a series of seductive theoretical frames is to find yourself in the presence of a dramatist of rare intellectual power. Chow's performances leave you 'captivated'—one of the theoretical terms she develops so unpredictably. I can't think of another academic who's been so impious or so enticing on the subject of domination and submission. It's a show you can't miss."—Bruce Robbins, author of Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence
"These lucid, beautifully astute, and critically persuasive meditations and mediations open the folds, tangles, and paradoxical reversals lurking inside what we mean and might mean by victimhood, enslavement, capture, and captivation; the underside of Christian forgiveness, coloniality, and 'life'; and the outside of the human, visibility, utopianism, and the indistinctness of art and non-art. Articulated in relation to the writings of a swath of European figures—Brecht, Benjamin, Rancière, Derrida, Agamben, Foucault, Deleuze, and others—Rey Chow's thought is wonderfully educative and provocative."—Brian Rotman, author of Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being
“[Chow’s] sharp analysis of the politics of contemporary culture, including the often surprising twists of her conclusions, makes every effort to follow her theory-saturated arguments worthwhile. . . . Her work on entanglements . . . reaches far beyond her own, carefully chosen examples. It can theoretically inform the study of a broad range of mediatized stagings, including our entrapments in harmful cultural patterns that have led to the present planetary environmental degradation." -- Greg Wilding * M/C Reviews *
Rey Chow’s work invariably combines complex issues in unusual ways to produce often-surprising conclusions. Her readings often combine quite a few already complicated issues and sets of questions into what is putatively 'one' analysis of 'one' thing. But through such analytic and interpretive entangling, Chow regularly shows the extent to which supposedly discrete issues are intertwined and entangled—in ways which thereafter come to seem glaringly obvious—but only after Chow’s incisive excavations.”  -- Paul Bowman * Social Semiotics *
"Especially noteworthy . . . is Chow's attempt to address what she calls ‘the difficult question of the changing status of the modern Far East in the Western, in particular the US academy after the Second World War.’ With characteristic acuity, she asks: ‘If, as China ascends to the position of an economic superpower, it is no longer possible to approach China as a subaltern nation … how should the clichés, the stereotypes, and the myths as well as the proper scholarly knowledge about the modern Far East be reassembled?’ Chow pushes the implications of this line of inquiry beyond the domain of area studies understood narrowly into a sustained consideration of the politics of knowledge produced in other fields including comparative literature, drawing our attention in this instance to the aspirations of major figures such as Auerbach and Said for what Chow calls ‘an ethically tolerant world literature.’” -- Guy Beauregard * Canadian Literature *
"Entanglements is particularly useful for its engagement with influential works from contemporary theory. Chow’s readings are helpful primers and glosses and her dialogue with the thought also provides productive, novel lines of inquiry." -- Se Young Kim * Comparative Literature Studies *
“Entanglements contributes fresh perspectives to postcolonial and feminist discussions on the possibility of emancipatory politics in a global culture preoccupied with mediated visibility.... Chow gestures toward what could best be called heteronomous thought: a thought of the other that refuses the politically progressive opposition between freedom and servitude.”
  -- Hongwei Thorn Chen * Discourse *

“The strength of Chow’s interventions lies in her refusal to think about these disciplines and discourses in terms of equivalence.... To keep things apart and, at one and the same time, hold them together in the same thought: this is the impossible task that Entanglements invites us to consider.”

-- Emilio Sauri * Postmodern Culture *
“Chow cuts and reconnects texts and theoretical approaches in innovative ways, moving fluidly between attentive, detailed readings and meditative, speculative modes.... Dense and wide-ranging, Entanglements provides both innovative analyses and pointed questions for any scholar interested in aesthetics, democratization, and domination in an age of digitization.” -- Nicole Simek * symploke *