Ornamentalism

Focusing on the cultural & philosophic conflation between the "oriental" & the "ornamental," Ornamentalism offers an original & sustained theory about Asiatic femininity in western culture. This study pushes our vocabulary about the woman of color past the usual platitudes about objectification & past the critique of Orientalism in order to formulate a fresher & sharper understanding of the representation, circulation, & ontology of Asiatic femininity. 

This book alters the foundational terms of racialized femininity by allowing us to conceptualize race & gender without being solely beholden to flesh or skin. Tracing a direct link between the making of Asiatic femininity & 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, & art has been surprisingly indebted to this very marginal figure & places Asian femininity at the center of an entire epistemology of race. 

Drawing from & speaking to the multiple fields of feminism, critical race theory, visual culture, performance studies, legal studies, Modernism, Orientalism, Object Studies & 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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Anne Anlin Cheng is a Princeton professor & author of The Melancholy of Race, Ornamentalism, & essays published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, & The Washington Post.