Ebook: Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience

The young mulatto chancing upon a photo about skin color; the man from Martinique hearing himself named "Negro" in France; Indian call center agents learning to Americanize their accents; the Algerian Jewish philosopher reflecting on his relation to the French language; African intellectuals debating the use of English; the translator acting as a traitor and a mourner in cross-cultural exchange; Cantonese-speaking writers of Chinese contemplating food consumption; radio drama workers straddling the forms of traditional storytelling and mediatized sound broadcast: drawing on these and other personae, Rey Chow depicts riveting scenes of postcolonial languaging imbricated with race, class, and biopolitical demarcations. The native speaker, the fulcrum figure often accorded a transcendent status, is realigned here as the repository of illusory linguistic origins and unities. Articulating historical experience to practices and affects based in sounds and scripts, this book definitively transforms the basic parameters of postcolonial inquiry.

A riveting series of stories that portray the biopolitics of speaking and writing in a postcolonial world.