14 Facts About Rey Chow

Rey Chow was born on 1957 and is a cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and film and postcolonial theory.

Rey Chow went to high school in Hong Kong and received a bachelor's degree at the University of Hong Kong.

Rey Chow received a doctorate in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1986.

Rey Chow has led a seminar at the School of Criticism and Theory.

Rey Chow currently is the Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University.

Rey Chow has made important contributions to a number of fields.

Rey Chow's work has been collected, anthologized and received special recognition in a number of academic spaces.

Paul Bowman collected a number of her essays in the Rey Chow Reader published by Columbia University Press.

Rey Chow has served on the editorial board for a number of academic journals and forums, including differences, Arcade, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, and South Atlantic Quarterly, as well as on the advisory board of feminist journal Signs.

In particular, though Rey Chow's research started in literary studies, her later work broaches larger academic concerns, similar to those negotiated by poststructuralist critical theorists.

However, even while comparing her work to poststructuralist critical theory, Bowman says that Rey Chow rethinks the concept that post-structuralist arguments need "always make things more complicated," instead trying to make these ideas more manageable.

Rather Rey Chow describes ethnicity as construct created by discourse which is rooted in the impulse to classify and understand the world in the terms of images.

Rey Chow calls these performance of ethnicity "coercive mimeticism", because the individual only simulates ethnicity in reaction to the social pressure placed on that individual to fulfill a certain ethnic role.

Also, Rey Chow describes how often the individual who provide the coercion are not of the hegemonic culture, but rather members of ethnic communities.