Martin Heidegger once wrote that the world had, in the age of modern science, become a world picture. For Rey Chow, the world has, in the age of atomic bombs, become a world target, to be attacked once it is identified, or so global geopolitics, dominated by the United States since the end of the Second World War, seems repeatedly to confirm. How to articulate the problematics of knowledge production with this aggressive targeting of the world? Chow attempts such an articulation by probing the significance of the chronological proximity of area studies, poststructuralist theory, and comparative literature--fields of inquiry that have each exerted considerable influence but whose mutual implicatedness as post-war U.S. academic phenomena has seldom been theorized. Central to Chow's discussions is a critique of the predicament of self-referentiality--the compulsive move to interiorize that, in her view, constitutes the collective frenzy of our age--in different contemporary epistemic registers, including the self-consciously avant-garde as well as the militaristic and culturally supremacist. Urging her readers to think beyond the inward-turning focus on EuroAmerica that tends to characterize even the most radical gestures of Western self-deconstruction, Chow envisions much broader intellectual premises for future trans-cultural work, with reading practices aimed at restoring words and things to their constitutive exteriority.

周蕾（Rey Chow）

齣生於香港，在美國史丹福大學先後獲得碩士、博士學位，曾任教於美國明尼蘇達大學，現為美國布朗大學Andrew Mellon人文學講座教授，為華裔文化研究領域最重要的學者之一。研究領域為：現代中國文學、當代女性主義理論、中國電影、後殖民理論及文化研究。

譯者簡介

陳衍秀

交通大學語言與文化研究所碩士，擅於英語教學，文化研究，中英筆譯。