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"At its proper and most radical, humanistic inquiry is about problems that do not have ready solutions. If this fundamental feature had been accepted, debates about the humanities in recent years might have taken a different kind of turn, whereby, instead of appending new and ever more purposeful modifiers to the word humanities--the digital, the environmental, the neuro, the medical, the public--the ways in which humanistic modes of intellectual labor operate could have assumed a more central focus. This would not have to mean adopting a conservative or conservatively disciplinary stance toward the humanities. Rather, it would demonstrate the ways in which humanistic inquiry approaches intellectual problems conceptually, methodologically, and practically, without necessarily seeking to legitimize the relevance of its undertakings by way of social utility and consensus.This possibility of reimagining humanistic study is the basic assumption and orientation of this book. Many books make use of Foucault's theories, but few use his work to reflect on the conundrums, dead ends, and potentialities of humanistic inquiry in the current Western academy. By juxtaposing debates about literary study, visibilities and invisibilities, sound/voice/listening, race/racism, and self- governance/entrepreneurship in a unique constellation against what Chow polemicizes as the moral instrumentalization of knowledge, A Face Drawn in Sand is intended as an intervention in some of the most pressing issues facing humanistic study today: how to process and analyze texts; how to form and sustain arguments; how to reconceptualize familiar problems through lesser known as well as very well known sources. Above all, how not to have the answers before the questions"--

Although the era of European colonialism has long passed, misgivings about the inequality of the encounters between European and non-European languages persist in many parts of the postcolonial world. This unfinished state of affairs, this lingering historical experience of being caught among unequal languages, is the subject of Rey Chow''s book. A diverse group of personae, never before assembled in a similar manner, make their appearances in the various chapters: the young mulatto happening upon a photograph about skin color in a popular magazine; the man from Martinique hearing himself name

The question explored in this article pertains to the type of exchange specific to human relations we call forgiveness. Hannah Arendt's comments on the subject provide a compelling justification for its necessity: "Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacks the magic formula to break the spell." Yet, precisely the imperative nature of forgiveness may be a source of epistemic conundrums. To elaborate this point, the author begins with a reference to a striking key episode at the heart of the South Korean film Miryang [Secret Sunshine] (2007), which stages forgiveness in the context of Christian evangelism. The article goes on to argue, through a discussion of the writings of Derrida and Auerbach, among others, that the connotations of forgiveness extend considerably beyond a strictly religious dimension, going so far as to bear on contemporary theoretical questions about translation and the secularization of representation.

rey chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where she teaches in the Departments of Modern Culture and Media, and Comparative Literature. She is the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is Ethics after Idealism:Theory–Culture–Ethnicity–Reading (Indiana University Press, 1998). She is also editor of Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (Duke University Press,forthcoming).

rey chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where she teaches in the Departments of Modern Culture and Media, and Comparative Literature. She is the author of a number of books, the most recent of which is Ethics after Idealism:Theory–Culture–Ethnicity–Reading (Indiana University Press, 1998). She is also editor of Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (Duke University Press,forthcoming).