reading the politics of admittance in games

Dear Daniel,

Thanks for your thoughts on the article that I passed along last week. In hindsight, I apologize for sending what was a dense piece of work. I had honestly not read it in a few months, so spending this weekend to re-read it was both a joy and a regret—this is how academia tends to spoil people’s social minds.

For other people who may not know what we’re talking about, I sent you an article penned by Rey Chow, a Chinese-American cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and film and postcolonial theory. This post makes reference to Chapter 5: The Politics of Admittance in The Rey Chow Reader, edited by Paul Bowman. The article offers a reading and critique of how Freud and Fanon articulate the relationships between community formation, race, and sexuality. It was first published in 1995.

Now, why did I send it? I suppose because I read postcolonialism as a project that (in part) grapples with the practice of equality and inclusivity. I find Chow’s article helpful in thinking about the ways in which communities are formed in and around videogames.