Ornamentalism
Anne Anlin ChengThis 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.
°°°
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.