Rey Chow (born 1957) is a cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and film and postcolonial theory.

Chow is currently Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University.

[2] Chow's writing challenges assumptions in many different scholarly conversations including those about literature, film, visual media, sexuality and gender, ethnicity, and cross-cultural politics.

Her critical explorations in visualism, the ethnic subject and cultural translation have been cited by Paul Bowman as being particular influential.

When analyzing the impact of Rey Chow's work for an article in the journal Social Semiotics, Chow scholar Paul Bowman highlights two important ways in which Chow has affected scholarship: first, she has helped diversify the research agenda of Chinese Studies scholars by problematizing the concept of "modern" and modernity, introducing gender issues, and bringing mass culture to studies of Chinese culture and literature with her first book Woman and Chinese modernity (1991); and, second, she has challenged many assumptions about ethnicity and ethnic studies through her books Ethics After Idealism (1998), The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002), The Age of the World Target (2006), and Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese films (2007).

[6] Rey Chow's work has also been collected, anthologized and received special recognition in a number of academic spaces.

Paul Bowman collected a number of her essays in the Rey Chow Reader published by Columbia University Press.

In particular, though Chow's research started in literary studies, her later work broaches larger academic concerns, similar to those negotiated by poststructuralist critical theorists.

Rather Chow describes ethnicity as construct created by discourse which is rooted in the impulse to classify and understand the world in the terms of images.

[5] In her book, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chow says that When minority individuals think that, by referring to themselves, they are liberating themselves from the powers that subordinate them, they may actually be allowing such powers to work in the most intimate fashion from within their hearts and souls, in a kind of voluntary surrender that is, in the end, fully complicit with the guilty verdict that has been declared on them socially long before they speak.

[5] In the final chapter of her book Primitive Passions, Rey Chow explores the implications of the use of the concept of cultural translation in comparative literature.

"[17] Chow challenges these faithfulness arguments by exploring how they interfere with the potentially useful process of clarification that can arise when converting a text from one cultural situation to another.