Not Like a Native Speaker: On Language as a Postcolonial Experience by Rey Chow (review)

Rey Chow’s striking book is informed by, and engages with, large areas of theoretical thought. The arguments will be useful to those of us in a range of departments, but it is the startling originality of the clashes and crashes between areas typically seen as discrete that is this book’s greatest distinction. To departments of comparative literature and translation studies, as well as to growing debates around transnationalism and global literatures, this book offers radical challenges. It also revitalizes discussions that have seemed to go stale, such as the classical debate around the language question in African literature. Each chapter makes an original contribution, and the juxtaposition of disparate theories makes for a memorable and extremely stimulating reading experience.

The book opens with a set of quotations that create for the reader a mosaic of interests: Michel Foucault on racism, Jacques Lacan on the language apparatus as an insidious arachnid in the brain, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari denying the existence of such a thing as a mother tongue, and finally the quotation that gifts Chow the title: Chinua Achebe’s wish that an African who learns to speak English never learns to “use it like a native speaker.” This set of voices acts like a chorus to Chow’s learned and inventively eclectic reflections on language acquisition and racialization.

The introductory chapter is called “Skin Tones—About Language, Postcoloniality, and Racialization,” and in it Chow develops an illuminating critique of Frantz Fanon’s familiar comments on language in his Black Skin, White Masks, arguing that the links between racial objectification and the workings of language in Fanon are underexplored. Chow has an eye for fresh clashes and interferences, and her discussion of language and accenting practices in offshore call centers is inspired and brilliant. Her insights into the workings of race and language in these call centers brings these language practices into focus as excellent examples of the workings of language and race everywhere. These spectral voices, she writes, have been “racialized by language and languaged by race” (9). Her argument is immediately appealing: “notwithstanding the shock, humiliation, rage, and melancholy involved, the colonized’s encounter with the colonizer’s language offers a privileged vantage point from which to view the postcolonial situation, for precisely the reason that this language has been imposed from without” (14). The colonized individual, in other words, is aware of language as what Chow calls a “prosthesis” (taking this term from Derrida’s Monolingualism of the other; or, the prosthesis of origin), something grafted on and which acknowledges that which the “native” speaker naturalizes and ignores at her peril. Derrida’s writings on monolingualism, which it is tempting to think one knows, are thus recast and reframed in chapter 1, “Derrida’s Legacy of the Monolingual.”

Chapter 2, “Not Like a Native Speaker: The Postcolonial Scene of Languaging and the Proximity of the Xenophone,” offers a fresh and thrillingly original intervention in the debate between Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on the status of English in postcolonial African contexts. Chow brings Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault to bear on this seminal debate in African writing, illuminating the Ngũgĩ-Achebe conversation as much as the continental traditions in which Benjamin and Foucault circulate. In this chapter, her own early childhood years in Anglo-Chinese Hong Kong are used to great effect, as a counterexample and analytical tool. Recasting the arguments about the role of English in postcolonial settings, her own experiences and linguistic practices reanimate the African debate.

This chapter also begins to explore the sociolinguistic and political potential of a new research area, Afro-Chinese relations; Chow’s work will provide useful research questions to this nascent field. “It is precisely,” she writes, “this severance, this cut with its racializing jaggedness that comes as a given in colonial education, that places those who have been thus subjugated in...