Rey Chow is Anne Firor Scott professor of literature and the current director of the literature programme at Duke University, Durham, USA, and distinguished visiting professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong. Chow’s recent books include Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (2014) and Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (2012). With James A. Steintrager, she is co-editor of the anthology Sound Objects (2018, forthcoming). With some modifications, this text is based on a public lecture delivered at Duke University in September 2017.