Ornamentalism

by Anne Anlin Cheng

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 Asiatic femininity. 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 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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Theory, Race, Art, Asian American, Aapi

222 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English and African American Literature at Princeton University. She specializes in twentieth-century literature and visual culture. She received her B.A. in English and Creative Writing at Princeton, her Masters in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University, and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from University of California at Berkeley. She teaches a wide range of courses in the areas of comparative race studies, aesthetic theory, psychoanalytic theory, literary criticism, law, film and gender studies, poetry and poetics.

Reviews

[donnalyn ♡ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read Anne Anlin Cheng's first essay on Ornamentalism many times, and it completely changed my perspective, giving words to feelings that I've always had but could never explain. I refer to it in almost every piece of writing because I think it is a theory that really is present in everything, or maybe it had such a strong impact on me that it has just become the lens through which I view my life. As an essay, it provides a clarity that is precise and perfectly condensed; as a book, it dives deeper, and allows for more care and sensitivity in the construction of very complex and new ideas. My Research Essays tutor always says that the heart of theory is sense-making: the pleasure/joy/discomfort of trying to make sense of things, the world, our place in it. Ornamentalism does exactly that, and so much more. I think its strength, both as a theory and a piece of writing, lies in its very discomfort that is as shocking at it is deeply familiar. It challenges so much of what I've learned about Western feminism in terms of embodiment and agency, and it does this by reassessing things that we are already accustomed to - through films, art, and food. At the same time, everything that Cheng says feels true to me; it is almost reaffirming to hear her name this particular type of emptiness that I can only associate with living not just as an Asian woman, but as a yellow woman.
I'm so happy that I finally own this book and I will hold onto it and continue to reread it over and over and write about it always!

[Muhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anne Anlin Chen is my hero. This book thinks through all my deeply personal/political but also academic/curatorial/editorial questions about race in America and proffers so many fertile morsels (some indubitably grotesque, some uneasily beautiful) through which to digest these questions. Chen weaves deftly through of dense theory, art history, pop culture, literature, and more with truly great writing throughout. I don’t often buy or keep books after reading them anymore, but this is one I know I will return to over and over.

Check out more of my reviews on my website! https://readwithmu.com/
And find me on Instagram :) https://www.instagram.com/readwithmu/

[Jessica Zu · Rating 3 out of 5]

very hard to read. but I appreciate the detailed analysis of how race and gender intersected at the skin/surface ....

[Sunny C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chapters 2 and 5 had me in a chokehold. What a beautiful entanglement of the racialized, fetishized, eroticized, dehumanized, and decorated body of the Asian American woman throughout literature and history.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

TLDR: Great ideas about the identity of Chinese and Japanese-American women, but very difficult to read due to high-level word choice and long sentence structure.

The premise of Ornamentalism is fascinating as it serves to justify the idea that yellow women (although Anne Anlin Cheng refers more specifically Chinese and Japanese women in America) are ornamental, represented by objects yet these objects, in turn, have become personified, as symbols have come to represent “yellow femininity.”

My main take away is that Asian women, unlike whites, are commodified and fetishized not for primitiveness (such as nudity), but rather for what they wear and what they represent, serving to bridge what it means to be person and what it means to be a thing. They are caught in a network of paradoxes and antithetical meanings:

"Encrusted by representations, abstracted and reified, the yellow woman is persistently sexualized yet barred from sexuality, simultaneously made an unmade by the aesthetic project. Like the proverbial Ming vase, she is at once ethereal and base, an object of value and a hackneyed trope."

As such, Asian women may need to embrace ornaments after being objectified to return back to who they were; however, they are not truly seen and are still reassembled by societal factors, essentially synthetic creations.

Okay, if you thought that my takeaway was difficult to read, I don’t blame you, since the ideas presented in the book are hard to grasp. Truthfully, Cheng’s writing style reminded of me a PhD thesis, presenting obscure ideas with lots of lists and parallelism, complicated words and statements, and lots of supporting evidence that I felt unnecessary/wasn’t well connected to the main point.

I will candidly admit that some of the information went over my head, and I just couldn’t reconcile with her diction and her comparisons. For instance, she has a whole chapter dedicated to “food” and “the sushi principle” which finds a way to tell the plot of a story “Bottles of Beaujolais” and attempts to relate that back to her theme, but it just didn’t make any sense to me. She has this whole idea about flesh and meat, discussing how confronting otherness and making it one’s own requires consumption.

I honestly don’t even know what that means.

And in the last two chapters, she references movies regarding Asian females and the “futuristic” notions surrounding Asian women as objects and makes a very fast comparison to Sethe’s experience in Toni Morrison's Beloved, both of which, I felt, diverged from her main topic.

Finally, given that this is a book more on exploration than solution, the conclusion is simply titled “Coda” and left me more bewildered than satisfied. Honestly, the “Preface” or the “Introduction” of the book should’ve served as the conclusion since they summarized more of the information and provided more direction rather than my final bafflement.

While I appreciate the revolutionary topic presented in the book and Cheng’s extraordinary comprehensive work (with detailed notes and sources), to the common reader, it wasn’t accessible.

[noelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

me when i’m eating sushi and i open myself up to the vulnerability of my flesh and also i am sushi

[Stephanie Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will definitely have more to say about this later once I actually start writing my thesis for real but holy moly. Anne Cheng is absolutely incredible in her analysis of ornamentalism. May have cried a bit too much for a book on theory but that’s okay …. I feel so seen and affirmed and my eyes have been opened to a whole new horizon of opportunity.

[grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

a behemoth of a book--one to read and reread and annotate. this was a recommendation given to me by a teacher after a discussion on the portrayal of race and the sort-of "consumption" of race through visuals. cheng has put words to thought i've had but never figured out how to voice. masterful discussion and analysis, i just wish the sentence structure was a bit easier to read.

[Julia]

Can’t believe I’m saying this, but once you actually commit yourself to Cheng her style actually becomes quite digestible. The questions that she poses and their implications that she explores in the conflations and porous interactions of objects, personhood, ontology, animation, alternative human genealogies, the erotics and liberation in ornament. It’s all so good!

[Iris (Yi Youn) Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is the yellow woman?

"Is she injured...or injured enough? The broader category of women of color, and in particular the yellow woman, teeters dangerously close to extinction without ever having come to much critical life. We say ‘black women,’ ‘white women,’ ‘brown women,’ but not ‘yellow women.’” - Cheng

An absolutely necessary read following the renewed focus on the sexualization/fetishization/objectification of Asian women after the Atlanta shootings. Cheng traces the history and origins of the Ornamentalization of the female body, a theory that merges Edward Said's Ornamentalism with the aesthetic of "ornamentalism" in the arts.

[Ruhi Pudipeddi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ornamentalism delves into how Asian femininity has been historically constructed as both exotic and decorative, revealing the complex interplay of race, aesthetics, and identity. Cheng defines ornamentalism as more than mere decoration with deep ties to racial and gendered power structures.

Cheng traces the evolution of ornamentalism from Victorian fashion to modern art & architecture, highlighting how these aesthetic principles have perpetuated hierarchies over time. She also explores this through the lens of historical figures, e.g. Anna May Wong, analyzing how her roles were confined to exoticized stereotypes and how she subtly defied these constraints.

I really enjoyed Cheng's film/photograph analysis & literary critique of works, e.g. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, illustrating how marginalized bodies are often valued for their beauty yet deemed disposable. she examines how clothing and accessories construct and signal racial and gender identities, offering examples from various cultures and time periods.

At the intersection of race, beauty, and identity, Cheng underscores how ornamentalism continues to shape cultural perceptions and practices, both as a form of oppression and a means of resistance. I'll have to re-read & annotate..

[Eric Lau]

Cheng presents a thingness—personness spectrum in Asian American women through legal, satorial (i.e., fashion or style), culinary and technological lenses. The vision of the “yellow woman” stirs a particular image in the mind, often one ornamented in one way or another. The book is guided by analyses of various media including historical photos, movies, a short story and museum exhibit. While I was able to follow the movie-centered (Anna May Wong and Piccadilly, Ghost in the Shell, Ex Machina) and short story (Bottles of Beaujolais) analyses, I was not familiar with any of the original media discussed and felt I lacked the proper frame to think more critically about the ideas Cheng offered in those parts. The analyses of the historical photos and museum exhibits were easier for me to think through with the photo artifacts themselves helpfully provided inline with the text. While there were photos and screenshots of certain scenes discussed from the movies, I felt this insufficient to fully grasp the totality of the film.

[Katy · Rating 2 out of 5]

With API month coming to a close, I figured now was a good time to make some progress on the API books I've acquired. However, this book was fairly underwhelming. It was a very challenging read due to the author's writing style. She is a huge fan of run-on sentences and overly descriptive language, which made it difficult to interpret the meaning of each sentence without re-reading them multiple times. Additionally, the author focuses mainly on Chinese women, as those subject to the Orientalism vs. ornamentalism struggle. Since I am not Chinese and there was only a brief mention of the contrasting lived experience for those of Japanese descent, I found it difficult to resonate with or confirm if these ideas were valid for my life.

I have struggled to find good API nonfiction, so if you have any recommendations, please let me know. I have had good luck with API fiction, but I'm also open to more recommendations as well.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

aaaaaaaaughadjkhlakdf mmmmm one of those things where I'm like hmmmmmmmm I agree but also disagree and also am iffy on some of the logical leaps being made/the close-reads of some of the works but ALSO am very impressed by the organization of the work and see lots of stuff that's super relevant and needs to be chewed on more because wow this was dense and tough to get through but I can see how and why it was organized the way it was [so this is also a master class on how to write a dense-ass thesis...lol jk I don't think I could get away with this] and ALSO I JUST THINK THIS WAY OF THINKING IS HITTING IN A VERY AMBIGUOUS SPACE THAT REALLY HASN'T BEEN EXPLORED AND CAN'T REALLY BE REDUCED OK I JUST FEEL LIKE IT'S *IMPORTANT* grrr

anyway here's my 13 pages of notes (they're not even shared or view-only, this is just because I DID HAVE THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS AND I NEED TO KEEP THINKING): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p...

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some well observed and explained sections in here that directly engaged with the author's argument and some other sections that I literally have no idea how it relates to her main argument (namely, I'm unsure what was actually being argued in the sushi chapter given that there is no Asian woman character even present in the short story being dissected). Overall compelling and does speak to some of the experiences I've had and have observed but often couched in language that obscures more than clarifies.

[Alessio]

Really rich reflections on the imbrications of ontology and objecthood (the synthesis of the two is perhaps the ou-topos of drag, or celebrity). I found Cheng’s juxtaposition of the yellow woman’s synthetic personhood with Hortense Spillers’s hieroglyphics of the flesh to be very productive. Nice psychoanalytic reading of the aesthetics of shine and radiance via Anna May Wong too. My only quibble is with OUP who should’ve done a better job laying out and selecting crisper images.

[Annabelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

so so good...a must read. Ornamentalism asks us to rethink flesh, personhood, objecthood, aesthetics, and the figure of the "yellow woman." From the coda: "...ornamentalism identifies both an epistemology and its fugitive meanings; both instrumentality and unexpected opportunities. It is tied to the practice and aesthetics of Orientalism, but it offers a critical framework beyond the limits of race and historic periodization carried by Orientalism, primitivism, and modernism."

[Hilary · Rating 5 out of 5]

A feminist theory of the “yellow woman,” through the lens of what Cheng terms “ornamentalism,” or the fusion between person and thing. In comparison to Black femininity, which Cheng argues is mainly of the wounded flesh, the yellow woman circulates in American and global culture as ornament: excessive, decorative, and marginal. Through analyses of the Chinese women in Chy Lung v. Freeman (1875), to Anna May Wong, to sushi and cyborgs, Cheng explains the fabrication of personhood through history and culture—but also ways in which the yellow woman has used her very thingness as subversion. It is worth noting that Cheng only uses East Asian examples; I wish this narrowness (if intended) or the definition of “yellow woman” was addressed in the book, since sometimes she uses pan-ethnic terms.

[Marnie Cannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the perspective and the concept of "ornamentalism" that Cheng brings to the discussion of feminism. It was just a very dense read which made it frequently difficult to follow along with her concepts and arguments.

[Mckayla Witt · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s political, racial and artistic theory so, it’s dense and requires some background knowledge of other theorists—But it’s a fantastic dive into the racial othering of yellow women. Sucks to be an ornament but lovely to have it articulated.

[Kristine · Rating 3 out of 5]

🤷📚

[Alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for book club.

[Chandrica · Rating 5 out of 5]

MINDBLOWN! and such beautiful prose ❤️

[Quan Nguyen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good content but such a difficult writing style that needs deciphering

[Jennie · Rating 5 out of 5]

💝💝💝

[carissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

no notes, anne anlin cheng is simply mother

[sarah ❀]

dnf @ 10%

this is just words on a page

i can’t understand what the author is trying to say at all bc of the (unnecessarily) complex vocab + sentences she’s decided to use

[Aden · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fabulous work of interdisciplinary social criticism, Cheng is really one of the best academic prose writers we have. Her sentences are fantastic.

[Lei · Rating 4 out of 5]

my problem is with the last chapter, the coda where she stages a comparison between african american enslaved women and ornamentalized yellow women, through the case of beloved.
well, the reading is not that convincing to me and it even seems a bit dangerous to me.
For one thing, her move rests on a compressed analogy between two radically different regimes of violence. By aligning the “yellow woman” and the black woman in beloved through the shared concept of objecthood, she suggests that both figures recover personhood through ornament. Yet this alignment depends on a conceptual flattening. The “yellow woman” emerges from a history of aestheticized racialization—feminized, commodified, incorporated into visual capitalism—where ornament functions as a mode of incorporation. By contrast, the black woman in Beloved is produced through chattel slavery, bodily terror, and ontological dispossession. These are not parallel forms of objecthood. Cheng’s reading quietly collapses aesthetic objectification and enslavement-based dehumanization into a single analytic category, allowing ornament to appear as a universal reparative medium.
This slippage becomes most visible in Cheng’s claim that “flesh that passes through objecthood needs ‘ornament’ as a way back to itself.” The language here operates metaphorically rather than analytically: “flesh,” “passes through,” and “way back” form a poetic chain that substitutes figurative coherence for argumentative grounding. Ornament is asserted as necessary, yet no account is given of why ornament—rather than kinship, memory, narration, or care—must bear this restorative burden. Even Cheng’s invocation of ornament as a “scaffold” exposes a conceptual instability: scaffold suggests a temporary structure, while “way back to itself” implies a constitutive condition of subjectivity. The terms never fully settle. (her language is very poetic, yet im not sure how its helping to advance a theory that is this complicated and broad.

[Mills College Library]

155.33308 C51873 2019