Ornamentalism

by Anne Anlin Cheng

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.