Ornamentalism

by Anne Anlin Cheng

they rarely speak of the angry yellow woman. This is not because she does not exist, but because jagged rage has not been in keeping with the style of her aesthetic congealment.

At most, Asian female anger exists on the American public stage in a peripheral, miniaturized, and cutified cartoon version (consider Lela Lee’s Angry Little Girls), or only seems to register in public consciousness when it appears in the form of internalized rage (consider the Tiger Mom).

racial identity in this country seems to garner recognition only when it can marshal sufficient indignation.

But Asian American critical feminism remains hampered by the divide between practice and theory. If Asian American feminist theory feels stuck in the first wave, and if the mere mention of the Asian woman these days invokes critical fatigue, it is partially due to this stubborn gulf, not to mention the ongoing suspicion of so-called Western, universalizing theory, even though, when it comes to an other who has been deeply woven into and out of the history of Western aesthetic history, it is misleading and unproductive to continue to think in terms of Western abstraction versus Eastern reality.

Indeed, decades of symptomatic and redemptive readings have reproduced this figure as always and only a subject of ressentiment with all the limits of this critique, as Wendy Brown has diagnosed for women’s studies in general over two decades ago.

At once closely linked to ideas of ancient civilizational values and yet far removed from the core of Western humanist considerations, she circles but is excluded from humanity. She represents feminine values but is often not considered a woman at all.

And I offer a theoretical frame that I call ornamentalism in order to turn our focus to the peripheral and the supplemental and to explore the transitive properties of persons and things. I want to track the incarnations of Asiatic femininity in Western modernity and its expansive embroilment with the ornamental and the Oriental. This figure embodies what Achille Mbembe calls the “aesthetics of superfluity”: that fragile mediation between indispensability and expendability that informs labor and life, especially at the height of imperialism and the subsequent global movements of bodies and things.8 This book is a story about what I am calling ornamental personhood and how it brings into view a much broader, often unseen, genealogy within the making of modern Western personhood. This is also a story about a different kind of flesh in the history of race making.

Instead of seeing the overnaming of the yellow woman as confounding identity or authenticity, I offer a different grammar as a provocation about the hybrid that is ornamental Asiatic femininity. What if we were to take the collusion between abstraction and racial embodiment as the given condition of Asiatic femininity? And what if, instead of seeing this amalgamation as eccentric to the conceptualization of a modern personhood, we were to see this peculiar figure as its constitutive double? That is, philosophically speaking, Western modern personhood as inherited from the Enlightenment is generally understood to be organic, individualistic, masculine, and white.

While primitivism rehearses the rhetoric of ineluctable flesh, Orientalism, by contrast, relies on a decorative grammar, a phantasmic corporeal syntax that is artificial and layered. If black femininity has been viciously erased by a cultural logic that has reduced it to, in Spillers’s words, “transitional mere flesh,” then yellow femininity has been persistently presented as something more like portable supraflesh.

Spillers famously observed that, since the black female is barred from crossing the symbolic threshold into personification, she is stuck on the threshold dividing the human and the not human, rendering her “vestibular to culture.”14 Where black femininity is vestibular, Asiatic femininity is ornamental.

In fact, the predominant trope of “black female flesh” has at times kept us from seeing those black female bodies that have thrived through unfleshliness. (Josephine Baker, a figure I have studied elsewhere, in Second Skin, provides an example of how the dominant trope of black female flesh has prevented us from seeing the complex fabrication that is her “skin.”)

Neither mere flesh nor mere thing, the yellow woman, straddling the person-thing divide, applies tremendous pressures on politically treasured notions of agency, feminist enfleshment, and human ontology. What we need, then, is not just an account of how Asiatic people have been used as things, or how Oriental things have influenced our uses of them, but instead a conceptual paradigm that can accommodate the deeper, stranger, more intricate, and more ineffable (con)fusion between thingness and personness instantiated by Asiatic femininity and its unpredictable object life.

men as diverse as Henry David Thoreau, Adolf Loos, and William Morris will come to predicate modern, masculinist, and nationalist Euro-American aesthetic character on the very rejection of the Oriental and the ornamental.

When it comes to the defiled (raced and gendered) subject, caught in the haunting convergence between aesthetic experience and material abuse, it is not enough to say that she serves as a tool for power or its sublimation, or that she offers nothing but the congealment of commodification.

When we attend to the critical labor of ornament, we will repeatedly find the intersection of beauty and terror, immateriality and corporeality, life and privation across a wide range of domains. Scars blossoming into the shocking beauty of chokecherry. Bare flesh growing like jewel shards. The law adjudicating legal persons through the sartorial. It is at the site of the unexpected entanglement with, or the inconvenient animation of, the ornament during moments of intense pain and privation that we begin to discern how the ornament as aesthetic decoration marks a political problematic about personhood.

It is easy to identify the wrongness of treating someone like a thing for one’s own invidious gains, but it is much harder to understand or to judge when one treats oneself like a thing. In making room for stranger forms of less-than-human agency that might erupt out of these moments of ornamentalist transformation, I hope to clear some new ground beyond the political cul-de-sacs of feminist and race studies: the impasse between victimization and agency, antiessentialism and authenticity, and so on. Ornamentalism for me poses less a dilemma of identity than a problematic about the imbrication of personhood and materialization.

Ornament becomes—is—flesh for Asian American female personhood. Commodification and fetishization, the dominant critical paradigms we have for understanding representations of racialized femininity, simply do not ask the harder question of what constitutes being at the interface of ontology and objectness. We need to find new ways to think about the entanglement of organic corporeality and aesthetic abstraction exemplified by yellow womanhood. How do we begin to think about racialized bodies that remain insistently synthetic and artificial? What about bodies not undone by objectness but enduring as objects?

I am less concerned here with the question of racial identity than in the processes of racialization and identification and the surprisingly profound role that style plays in their making. I offer the yellow woman here not as the real but rather as a conceptual category and a critical agent, with the clear understanding that the origin of this term derives from a racist framework that is indifferent to ethnic and national specificities and to diasporic realities.

This case demonstrates not only the Orientalist imagination of nineteenth-century American law but also what I am calling the logic of ornamentalism—the displacement of biological “personness” through the fabrication of synthetic “personness”—at work within the logic of legal personhood.

The law contributes to the making of Asiatic female visuality in ways that conflate race not with biological epidermis, as is often assumed, but rather with synthetic adornment, thereby revealing the abstraction and artifice fundamental to the logic of race. (2) The forensic use of visual evidence started not with the introduction of modern technologies like photography, but instead with the phantasmic construction of “illegible” and “foreign” bodies. (3) Finally, nineteenth-century Orientalism’s impact on the legal imaginary altered the assumptions of eighteenth-century natural laws and continues to impact contemporary conceptualizations of legal personhood in fascinating and complex ways.

Apparently, as historian Paul Kramer dryly observes, “for California officials and in the eyes of the law, there is little difference between disability, immorality, and Chinese femininity.”7

These testimonies are strikingly incoherent and contradictory. For example, only prostitutes wear certain things, styles, and colors, but then so do respectable and wealthy Chinese wives.17 Indeed, as the trial proceeds, the boundary between “respectable Chinese wives” and “pestilential prostitutes” becomes increasingly hard to determine.

Does ornamentalism capture the class based sexism here?

Unlike African Americans, whose legal racialization was based on something beyond visibility alone—the infamous one-sixteenth “blood” rule, intended to bypass the potentially deceptive visible, as in the cases of passing—the racialization of the Chinese was intractably tied to their physical appearances and their nonpassable, inescapably “foreign-looking” bodies.

Yet according to court recording and press coverage at the time, the women in question mostly wore uninteresting, black, loose-fitting clothes. (Let us remember that these women had been aboard a cramped ship for over a month.) Thus all the categories that the California court took to be visually and hence materially evident in this case—corporeality as evidence of racialized subjectivity, feminine decoration, the relations between skin and what rests on it—turn out to be not evident. The invocation of ostentatious female ornamentation—that most visible and material of categories—pivoted between imagined presence and projected absence. The women were thus simultaneously dressed up and stripped down. The evidence of an overmaterialized and scopically available body emerges not out of bare flesh or real ornaments, but instead from their phantasmic conflation, an overlapping of surfaces located in teasing peripheries: the borders of a collar, the peep of a hem, the gleaming edge of a sleeve.

Draw this out more? How ormamemtals exist within mans imagination

To dismiss this scene as yet another regrettable example of racist prurience or Puritanical conservatism is to miss the extraordinary negotiation of the visible and the invisible at play here. The California court took the Chinese female body to be self-evident. But how that body evidences the invisible in its visibility or vice versa has yet to be fully examined. What happens when we consider the ideas of body, skin, cloth, and ornament as interrelated metaphors for thinking about personhood in American social and legal realms in the nineteenth century, and what are the legacies of these entwined ideas for us today?

The trial offers us an interesting view into the phenomenology of what Alan Hyde calls “a jurisprudence of human presence.”27 Hyde tells us that the law relies on a distinction between the physical and the discursive body. I suggest there is a third term—the ornamental—at play.

But, when this great principle comes to be applied to the actual and various conditions of persons in society, it will not warrant the assertion, that men and women are legally clothed in the same civil and political powers. [emphasis added]28 All bodies may be considered equal, but their civil covering is not. With Roberts, the court appears to be confirming equality before the law based on the commonality of naked bodies, but it immediately delimits that universality by subsuming the biological body in the social body—or, more accurately, social ornamentation.

Here “legal cloth” signals more than a rhetorical flourish and articulates the very logic of civil rights as a form of extra adornment. What makes a theoretically blank body come to emit meaning and visibility (whether the visibility of legitimacy or otherwise) turns on this external overlay. In Dress, Law and Naked Truth: A Cultural Study of Fashion and Form, Gary Watt traces the long etymological connection between law and dress; we often speak of “the cloak of justice,” “vested interests,” “to pin a crime on someone,” and so forth.29 But where Watt posits law and dress as cultural equivalents (in that both the judicial and the sartorial aim to regulate and order the body, which is why his study focuses on the regulation of uniforms, judicial robes, etc.), I suggest that the relationship is not simply analogous but structural.

Dress designates civility and quotidian order, as Watt insightfully observes, but ornament designates a category of dress that is marginal, excessive, and nonutilitarian (that is, unlike dress that is required by civil society).

In proclaiming that rights and legal personhood are decorative rather than biological or essential, Roberts reminds us that personhood is a function of legal ornaments.

Ozawa v. U.S. (1922) and U.S. v. Thind (1923) are instances where the determining evidence of “skin color” reveals all its dizzying contingencies and mutabilities.30

How does skin color matter when court has admitted equality of naked bodies?

(Ironically, photographs show that Ozawa was rather Caucasian-looking and could probably have passed as white, reminding us yet again that what is at stake is not epidermal visibility but racial visuality.) Ozawa asked the law to recognize the habits of his life (where he works, where he goes to church, what he wears, and more), but the Court resorts to a language of biology to deny the meaning of such quotidian adornment.

Best contends that the conceptions of slave property are indebted to abstract rather than biological aspects of personhood, while Allewaert argues that plantation labor practices and ecological peculiarities contest the ideal of a person as a discrete, purely biological agent. Here I suggest that the Asiatic body—especially the feminine, ornamental body—also sheds light on the particularly synthetic and sartorial roots of legal personhood, with profound implications for the contemporary conceptualization of the “natural” person and “natural” rights.

The ideal of a naked or unornamented self, seductive as it may be, cannot be the solution to the problem of racism, oppression, or discrimination, for that ideal denies how the (racialized) “self” is always already an effect of the ornament worn.

Clothing and ornaments can offer the performance, the habitus, through which we acquire our sense of selfhood.

How are clothing and ornament different?

We are thus effectively legally protected exactly where our racial and sexual identities do not live.

self-possession is often made possible through the layers and mediations of “otherness.”

let us also recall that the body before the law was never anything but a strapping of things and covers.

“We speak of [the body] to others as of a thing that belongs to us; but for us it is not entirely a thing, and it belongs to us a little less than we belong to it.”63 To speak to a legal sense of the body requires no less an aporia. The law sutures our bodies into its sartorial imagination. We are both more and less than the ornaments that unavoidably mark our skin with such mute insistence.

After all, in contrast to primitivism, which deploys a rhetoric of nakedness, Orientalized femininity from Mata Hari to Afong Moy (the Victorian traveling “Chinese Lady” display) has always relied on the spectacularization not of naked skin but of ornament: the excessive coverings and decorations that supposedly symptomize the East’s overdeveloped and hence feminized and corrupt civilization.

Wong’s inwardness speaks not to her ontological authenticity (as fans may be eager to assume), but rather to theatrical work itself: the active production of a presence made for witness. This hint of interiority does not secure for the performer a privacy that is safe from public prurience; this is, after all, a scene about publicity.13 Wong’s performance of withdrawal produces a fantasy of interiority, which the audience can then witness and treasure.

fantasies of “skin” (a trope that seems invariably racialized and gendered) may be profoundly indebted to fantasies about covering.

Glamour’s shellacked beauty reminds us that the presentation of self as object for consumption coexists with the rendering of that self as indigestible.

In the end, it is the extravagance of ornamentalism, rather than the fulfillment of embodiment, that proves to be the source of Wong’s enduring, enticing refusal.

The critique of power, from Michel Foucault to Edward Said to Ann Laura Stoler, has long taught us that carnality and flesh, instead of being private domains, are sites that have been deeply penetrated and structured by power. Human flesh has undeniably been one of the highest prices paid for the history of human enslavement. And often in feminist and racial discourses, understandably, we end up with a longing for that lost and violated flesh or, inversely, a total refusal of the body.

What happens to our notions of the subject when carnality is cultivated not out of flesh but from its fusion with inorganic matter?

As if in answer to this bracing realization, we find the dress in plate 56 as well in the Blue Willow assembly. Here aesthetic congealment has grown into full-bodied edifice. The to-be-used Chinese female body seems to have petrified into domestic and collectible things (pieces of teapots, cups, plates) whose value now resides in their aggressive uselessness. At the same time, this congealed and fractured domesticity, offering repurposed purposelessness, transcends its own quotidianness to lay claim to art. Made by contemporary artist Li Xiaofeng (b. 1965), this piece is clearly not human, but nor is it entirely a thing. The weight (of material, history, domesticity, femininity) implies petrification, but the form suggests flight. Is this dress or armor? Winged victory or the madwoman in the attic? A tribute to monumentality or a concession to the mundane? What has died here, the human or the ornament? And finally, has the human outmoded itself or has the object outrun the human demand?

Li’s fragmented plates and teacups—his reassembled “Chinese details,” this weighty, nonhuman embodiedness—suggests that it may be in this very transition from mere thing to ornament (that is, the technology of ornamentalism) that things Chinese can maneuver for value. Entwined with the trauma of authenticity enacted by this sculpture dress is therefore the further possibility that this twenty-first-century Asiatic porcelain body made for an Euro-American audience may be seeking to outmode itself to continue to be relevant on the modern stage. Like a treasure dealer who is also a dumpster diver, Li compels us to consider our national and temporal assumptions about what modernity imagines is lost to it. Here the “ethnic detail” offers temporal recapitulation via the crafted insistence on its own death and lostness, as if to say “I am relevant today because I am no longer relevant.” Indeed, like dead languages, Li’s fragments can seem to become untranslatable, atavistic, Oriental, beautiful, and modern all at once.28

Indeed, “Chinese” has become the metaphor for dead beauty, the living dying into ornamental life. And it is precisely this dynamic dying that lends these inhuman objects their melancholic human beauty.

Historians and cultural critics have extensively documented the enduring and abject association between raced subjects and animals: blacks as apes, Asians as pigs or rats or dogs, Jews as rats, and so forth.18 These animalized bodies are then consumed in a variety of ways for multiple purposes: for labor, for scapegoating, and in the service of national consolidation, just to name a few.19 This consumption, moreover, has been done in the name of desire and repulsion: what Eric Lott famously calls the “love and theft” enacted by American racial dynamics, which in turn has produced what Tompkins labeled America’s “racial indigestion.”