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.
