This follow-up volume to our book The Age of the World Target collects interconnected 'entangled' essays of major literary and cultural theorist Rey Chow. The essays take up ideas of violence, capture, identification, temporality, sacrifice, and victimhood, engaging with theorists from Derrida and Deleuze to Agamben and Ranciere. In the introduction Chow describes the concept of entanglement as a set of overlapping enfolded concerns, meetings not designed by affinity but pulled together into relation - a scene where new thinking might occur.

How might the pornographic be associated with Brecht's and Benjamin's media theories? How are Foucault's and Deleuze's writings on visibilities "postcolonial"? What happens when Rancière's discussions of art are juxtaposed with cultural anthropology? What does a story by Lao She about collecting reveal about political collectivism in modern China? How does Girard's notion of mimetic violence speak to identity politics? How might Arendt's and Derrida's reflections on forgiveness be supplemented by a film by Lee Chang-dong? What can Akira Kurosawa's films about Japan say about American Studies? How is Asia framed transnationally, with what consequences for those who self-identify as Asian?

These questions are dispersively heterologous yet mutually implicated. This paradoxical character of their discursive relations is what Rey Chow intends with the word "entanglements," by which she means, first, an enmeshment of topics: the mediatized image in modernist reflexivity; captivation and identification; victimhood; the place of East Asia in globalized Western academic study. Beyond enmeshment, she asks, can entanglements be phenomena that are not defined by affinity or proximity? Might entanglements be about partition and disparity rather than about conjunction and similarity?
Across medial forms (including theater, film, narrative, digitization, and photographic art), and against more popular trends of declaring things and people to be in flux, Chow proposes conceptual frames that foreground instead aesthetic, ontological, and sentient experiences of force, dominance, submission, fidelity, antagonism, masochism, letting-go, and the attraction to self-annihilation. Boundary, trap, capture, captivation, sacrifice, and mimesis: these riveting terms serve as analytic pressure points in her readings, articulating perversity, madness, and terror to pursuits of freedom.

"“[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."" - 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.” " - 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.’” - 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." - 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.”
 " - Discourse

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“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.”

"“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.”" - symploke