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[REVIEW] “Rey Chow and the Politics of Coercive Mimeticism in The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism” by Anna Nguyen

Rey Chow. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Columbia University Press, 2002. 237 pgs.

During my MFA programmes, there was an exercise that many instructors assigned to their students: imitation. While I understand that such exercises may serve as a means for students to deconstruct so-called masterful writing, I greatly disliked them, particularly when white writing students attempted to imitate a writer of colour. What is often imitated is merely the surface-level construction of a narrative; omitted are the political grievances, insights, and tensions that make the stories powerful. Yet, because MFA programmes remain predominantly white spaces, students of colour writing beyond imitation may find themselves tasked with representing their worlds in language that resonates with the white gaze. Imitations are imitations precisely because they can be deconstructed into an accessible and prescriptive formula.

How delighted I was, then, to encounter postcolonial theorist Rey Chow’s concept of coercive mimeticism while reading the third chapter of The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In thinking through ethnic representation, Chow reviews Fredric Jameson’s earnest argument on assumed differences in third-world literature, which she regards as a reversion to stereotyping grounded in the Western canon (p. 97). In a particularly intriguing reference to John Berger’s illuminating 1977 essay “Why Look at Animals?”, which discusses the historical transformations of Western man’s relationship with animals, Chow considers how public zoos and national allegories rest upon a kind of captivity narrative “in which nonwhite ethnicity and its cultural (re)production are continually ensnared in modernity” (p. 100). In the preceding chapter, Chow observes that once stereotypes shift…

… from cognitive psychology to aesthetic representation, a very different kind of question emerges…it becomes necessary to consider exactly how stereotypes duplicate and imitate and what they can tell us about the negative acts that are often attributed to them (injury, violence, and aggression) and the assumptions that support such attributions. (p. 54)

Mimeticism becomes coercive when ethnic subjects are pressured to mimic, imitate, and perform according to dominant Western cultural expectations rooted in stereotypes or in ignorant assumptions of authenticity.

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There is much to admire in Chow’s The Protestant Ethnic, of which I have offered a highly individual reading with craft and writing in mind. As a broader work of scholarship, Chow’s book naturally bears an obvious reference to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which she reads as identifying “the spiritual side of capitalism’s commodifying rationale” (p. viii). Whereas Weber traces the origins of the capitalist work ethic back to religion during the Reformation, Chow takes the literal meaning of “protestant” to denote a person who protests. Chow retitles Weber’s historical text The Protestant Ethnic in order to focus on “the question of ethnicity in late capitalist Western society, where cross-cultural and cross-ethnic transactions have become not only a daily routine but also an inevitability” (p. vii).

Chow also offers an interesting critique of our current understanding of ethnicity, which she argues is “theoretically ambivalent, confusing, indeed self-contradictory” (p. viii). Tracing the term from its original use in setting boundaries between heathens and gentiles, Chow states that the modern use of ethnicity “tends to be universalist and inclusionary in that everyone is now considered to be ethnic in the sense of belonging to one or another grouping” (p. viii). Such narrow acceptance may consequently fail to account for the harm and violence that target the very ethnic communities whose labour has been commodified. Notably, this claim closely resembles the ever-present embrace of “representation matters” or “feeling seen”. I am reminded of a provocation Chow poses at the start of Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films. The question “Where is the movie about me?” stands as its own paragraph, followed by a litany of cinema-related questions posed in the academic study of film: “How come I am not represented? What does it mean for me and my group to be unseen? What does it mean for me and my group to be seen in this manner: what has been left out?” (2007, p. 1). When representation is the minimum politics we seek, we must also ask: what have we given up for the sake of being represented?

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The politics of identification recur throughout The Protestant Ethnic, which opens with a rereading of The Order of Things, in which Michel Foucault narrates the emergence of Man after the Enlightenment. This figure of Man is a recent historical creation, a reflection of the fragmented modern world and its disciplines (i.e. biology, economics, literature). For Chow, Foucault’s most important argument “is that knowledge itself is not a given but rather an outcome of shifting historical relations of representation” (2002, p. 1). There are two parallel, paradigmatic sets of knowledge developments, the first being the scientific objectification of the world. Yet empiricism can tell only a particular story. Observable phenomena cannot simply be interpreted as continuous or natural, and thus the world cannot be a knowable object.

These parallel paradigms of knowledge raise the question of what emerged as an alternative to the natural sciences. Specifically, Chow identifies cultural and postcolonial studies as fields that have extended Foucault’s arguments by examining his omission of race and ethnicity, a product of Foucault’s Eurocentric Man. Thus, the Foucauldian concept of biopower, which describes how powerful social institutions and the modern nation-state control human biology, can be reordered to examine how race and ethnicity are likewise not natural but residues of the Enlightenment that continually seek to commodify racialised bodies.

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Chow’s revised framework, then, considers the terms “race” and “ethnic”, wherein neither category, and particularly not modern conceptions of ethnicity, is biological or a liberating identity. Rather, both are markers of how the terms have become disciplined under global late-stage capitalism. Chow concedes that “ethnic” features prominently in the title of her monograph, though this is not to diminish the significance of racism. She cites Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities by the Marxist scholars Immanuel Wallerstein and Étienne Balibar, drawing particularly on the latter, who conceives of ethnicity as a fictive ideology (p. 24).

As one might expect from Chow’s work, literary analyses supplement the theory. Chapter four offers a keen focus on autobiographical ethnic writing and the expectations surrounding it, ethnic narcissism, and ethnic abjection. In her reading of Garrett Hongo’s “Introduction: Culture Wars in Asian America”, she quotes his concern that “to speak about a trauma or social prohibition, to speak against silencing, can initiate further acts of trauma, silencing, and prohibition of the speaker” (p. 143).

Chow’s citations, recitations, and analyses describe deeply material scenarios, not merely theoretical ones. I encounter them all too often in my own writing life and in spaces where writing is regarded as a communal activity. And, like many academic texts, Chow’s ultimately asks readers to consider unimagined ways of thinking and writing in this period of late-stage capitalism, a term Chow uses in both a descriptive and an analytic sense. What remains unsaid, unwritten, and unimagined?

Bibliography

▚ Chow, Rey. Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films. Columbia University Press, 2007.

^{How to cite: Nguyen, Anna. “Rey Chow and the Politics of Coercive Mimeticism in The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 31 Oct. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/10/31/protestant.}

Anna Nguyen left her PhD programme and reworked her dissertation into a work of creative non-fiction while studying for an MFA at Stonecoast, University of Southern Maine. Her work brings together literary analysis, science and technology studies, and social theory to examine institutions, language, expertise, citation practices, and food. She is currently undertaking a second MFA in poetry at New England College, where she also teaches first-year composition. She is the host of the podcast Critical Literary Consumption. “An Asian Study: January” is her first published work of fiction. [All contributions by Anna Nguyen.]