A Face Drawn in Sand

A Face Drawn in the Sand cuts into the present with breathtaking clarity. Redeploying Foucault's work in startling new ways, Rey Chow engages everything from humanistic study in the neoliberal university to racism, sound theory, the digitized smartself, and sand painting. As brilliant as it is courageous, this book not only changes how we read Foucault. It teaches us how to think: how to press against the limits of our contemporary order. A tour de force! -- Lynne Huffer, author of <i>Foucault's Strange Eros</i> If, as Foucault said, we have yet to cut off the head of the king, Chow offers the sharpest blade yet: critique forged in immanence. With the equanimity of a saint and the tenacity of a battle-scarred scholar, she puts a point on Foucault's productive hypothesis: to denounce power is not to say no to it. The result is a compelling series of interventions into the fields of study that matter most for humanistic inquiry today: critical race studies, sound studies, media studies, transnational and global studies. Chow's gift is a vision of what these fields might be, beheaded. -- Thomas Lamarre, author, <i>The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation and Game Media</i> In this lucid, concise, and passionate book, Rey Chow theorizes the dire effects of entrepreneurial capitalism in our digital age while showing how a humanistic intellectual should confront the essential problems created and obscured by that capitalism. The recovery of Foucault is brilliant, timely, and liberating. -- Paul A. Bove, author, <i>Love's Shadow</i> In A Face Drawn in the Sand, Rey Chow not only offers a provocative and original reading of Foucault, but mobilizes this reading to analyze some of the most important oppositions in literary studies today: close reading versus distant reading, surface reading with its re-aestheticization of the text versus STEM-inspired social science approaches, identity versus racialization, among others. Rather than attempt simply to adjudicate these conflicts in the interests of compromise, Chow reconstructs their theoretical and historical conditions of possibility to determine how these oppositions came to be posed in their current form. In doing so, she allows us to rethink them and perhaps better articulate the problems they seek to address, This is a much-needed book. -- Warren Montag, co-author, <i>The Other Adam Smith</i>