Ornamentalism

Focusing on the cultural and philosophic conflation between the "oriental" and the "ornamental," Ornamentalism offers an original and sustained theory about Asiatic femininity in western culture. This study pushes our vocabulary about the woman of color past the usual platitudes about objectification and past the critique of Orientalism in order to formulate a fresher and sharper understanding of the representation, circulation, and ontology of Asiaticfemininity. This book alters the foundational terms of racialized femininity by allowing us to conceptualize race and gender without being solely beholden to flesh or skin. Tracing a direct link between the makingof Asiatic femininity and a technological history of synthetic personhood in the West from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Ornamentalism demonstrates how the construction of modern personhood in the multiple realms of law, culture, and art has been surprisingly indebted to this very marginal figure and places Asian femininity at the center of an entire epistemology of race. Drawing from and speaking to the multiple fields of feminism, critical racetheory, visual culture, performance studies, legal studies, Modernism, Orientalism, Object Studies and New Materialism, Ornamentalism will leave reader with a greater understanding of what it is to exist as a"person-thing" within the contradictions of American culture.

“Through a constellation of mesmerizing scenes- from the courtroom to the museum to the sushi bar, from early photographs to cyberfiction film- Anne Anlin Cheng reveals the drama of ornamentalism in Anglo-American culture: the ontological force with which Asiatic femininity resides in an aesthetics of ornamental personhood. Within the dynamics of this drama- conflating the abstract and the corporeal, the figural and the real- personhood and objecthood ineluctablyconverge. Above all Ornamentalism tracks new and essential questions for the study of racialized gender.”

"Cheng's scholarship affectivizes theoretical approaches to subjectivity, to objectivity, and to their relation, by showing how...the ornaments ...of modernity are not additions to (adornment on) pre-existing subjects and objects, but instead bring these elements into ontological and phenomenological tangibility." -- M. Gail Hamner, Syracuse University"Cheng offers no less than a thorough reworking of the dichotomies that have thus far structured racial thinking--self/other, subject/object, surface, depth, agency/injury." -- Los Angeles Review of Books"What Anne Cheng looks to offer in her new monograph Ornamentalism is a heretofore-missing theory of Asiatic femininity ... Ornamentalism offers an alternative vision of agency as not resistance but resilience, of forms of living produced under impossible conditions -- providing, too, a much-needed concretization of post-humanism's rhetorical gestures." -- Chalay Chalermkraivuth, Brink"Through a constellation of mesmerizing scenes- from the courtroom to the museum to the sushi bar, from early photographs to cyberfiction film- Anne Anlin Cheng reveals the drama of ornamentalism in Anglo-American culture: the ontological force with which Asiatic femininity resides in an aesthetics of ornamental personhood. Within the dynamics of this drama- conflating the abstract and the corporeal, the figural and the real- personhood and objecthoodineluctably converge. Above all Ornamentalism tracks new and essential questions for the study of racialized gender." --Bill Brown, University of Chicago"A worthy successor to Edward W. Said's Orientalism, Cheng's Ornamentalism contours the breadth of ornamentation's enmeshment with orientalist logics and poses socially pertinent questions regarding the distinctive ways in which Blackness and Asianness are visualized and adorned." --Rache l Lee, University of California, Los Angeles"This bold and astonishingly original book is many things at once. Attending to the ways in which race and beauty troublingly but also pleasurably intertwine, it begins as a study of comparative racialization that shows how the dehumanization of persons transpires differently: some by being reduced to flesh and biology, others, by being turned into artificial shells. A much needed theorization of Asiatic femininity in the Western imagination that thinks withoutmoralizations, Ornamentalism is a brilliant, groundbreaking book that shows how the ideology of race renders subjects excessively visible but also simultaneously hard to see." --Sianne Ngai,University of Chicago"This is a stunning critical-historical unpacking of the figure of the 'Asiatic yellow woman' as a peripheral person/object, exotic/erotic, she/it. This haunted 'theory of being' nudges and advocates a fuller critique adding to #MeToo universalism and the shorthand of 'black and brown' women and fem bodies-opening a more decolonizing internationalist theory of raced, gendered, and sexualized intimacies, differentiation, and power." --John Kuo Wei Tchen, RutgersUniversity-Newark

Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Princeton University. She is also affiliated with the University's Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Committee on Film Studies. Her most recent book is Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface (OUP 2011).

Focusing on the cultural and philosophic conflation between the "oriental" and the "ornamental," Ornamentalism offers an original and sustained theory about Asiatic femininity in western culture. This study pushes our vocabulary about the woman of color past the usual platitudes about objectification and past the critique of Orientalism in order to formulate a fresher and sharper understanding of the representation, circulation, and ontology of Asiaticfemininity. This book alters the foundational terms of racialized femininity by allowing us to conceptualize race and gender without being solely beholden to flesh or skin. Tracing a direct link between the making of Asiatic femininity and a technological history of synthetic personhood in the West from thenineteenth to the twenty-first century, Ornamentalism demonstrates how the construction of modern personhood in the multiple realms of law, culture, and art has been surprisingly indebted to this very marginal figure and places Asian femininity at the center of an entire epistemology of race. Drawing from and speaking to the multiple fields of feminism, critical race theory, visual culture, performance studies, legal studies, Modernism, Orientalism, Object Studies and New Materialism, Ornamentalism will leave reader with a greater understanding of what it is to exist as a person-thing within the contradictions of American culture.

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