Ethics after Idealism TheoryCultureEthnicityReading [Paperback]

Methodologically situated in the contentious spaces between critical theory and cultural studies, and always attending to the implications of ethnicity, this book constitutes a unique intervention in contemporary cultural politics. Social Semiotics

At a time when cultural identity has become intrinsic to the way we read our many others, Rey Chow argues that what demands to be examined critically is no longer identity politics per se but the idealismespecially in the sense of idealizing othernessthat lies at the heart of identity politics. She discusses multiple cultural formsfiction, film, popular music, poetry, and essaysand a range of cultural topicspedagogy, multiculturalism, fascism, sexuality, miscegenation, fantasy, nostalgia, and postcoloniality.

Rey Chow is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of several books, including Woman and Chinese Modernity, Writing Diaspora, Xie zai guo yi wai, and Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema, which was awarded the James Russell Lowell Prize by the Modern Language Association.