Ornamentalism Quotes

“the ancient Greek word for adornment, kosmos, means both “decoration” and “world order.” (This is, of course, why the words cosmetics and cosmology share an etymological root.)”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“the very premise of this project takes seriously, rather than simply decries, the intractable imbrication among femininity, the ornamental, and the Oriental, in order to explore the entanglement of living and living-as-thing.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“The curio, denoting a piece of bric-a-brac from the Far East since the mid-nineteenth century and a shortened form of the word curiosity, already draws something from the enchanted transformation of ornamentalism: the thing that becomes Thing—but, alas, never quite free from a threatening intimacy with its original status as a mere thing.24 This uneasy fluctuation between value and waste always haunts the curio, which is to say, haunts the “Oriental thing.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“The Oriental curio, then, is the material sediment of the crisis of (national, ethnic) aura.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“With Beijing Memory No. 5, what is uncanny is that the “machine” refuses to come to life, and in its lifelessness, imagines what life might have been. And it is in this very paradox of “might have been” that we experience the prospective and prosthetic quality of our ontology.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“And our understanding of ourselves is deeply indebted to how we have imagined animality in the first place.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“R. John Williams calls the ongoing life of Orientalism in contemporary tech and corporate culture “Asia-as-technê,” which he defines as “a compelling fantasy that would posit Eastern aesthetics as both antidote to and the perfection of machine cultures.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“From the divergence between black flesh and yellow ornament, we have arrived at this convergence: flesh that passes through objecthood needs ornament to get back to itself.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“For mortified racialized flesh, ornamentalism points us to what it might take to reconceptualize personhood for persons who have been undone, challenging us to ask how to make discernible the peripheral, how to work the edges, how to enhance presence in the face of absence. If feminist scholars have been committed to the flesh in order to undo the taxonomy of gender, then ornamentalism points us toward a consideration of object life that not only refutes but also suspends the taxonomy of the human.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“It is surely ironic to fuss over how fresh the fish being fed to him are and how “authentic” his tank vegetation is when he is isolated, held captive, and put on display. The ritual of care disguises the violence, just like the preparation of sushi itself.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“It is not only that bodies can leave their residue in the things they produce (an insight that object studies has taught us), but also that objectness reveals the divergent, layered, and sometimes annihilating gestures that can make up personhood. More than memorializing bodies that might otherwise not be remembered, Li’s porcelain woman explores what it would mean to instantiate through excess materiality the dematerialized nonbody.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“What happens when we accept that style, mediated through yet detached from a racial referent, may not be simply the excess or the opposite of ontology but may in fact be a precondition for embodiment, an insight that challenges the very foundation of the category of the human? What is at stake here is not just the objectification of people but also how that objectification opens up a constitutive estrangement within the articulation of proper personhood.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“Where Orientalism is about turning persons into things that can be possessed and dominated, ornamentalism is about a fantasy of turning things into persons through the conduit of racial meaning in order, paradoxically, to allow the human to escape his or her own humanness.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“It is not surprising, then, that the fates of Chinese female bodies and Chinese porcelain ran parallel to each other. When it came to represent the precariousness of a system of Western wealth based on importing novel Eastern goods, porcelain, along with other things Asiatic, started to lose its radiance. As Euro-American acquisitiveness began to run in excess of what it could offer China in return, the early romance with china and China began to deteriorate. This breakdown left lasting traces in American law and economic policy, from U.S. foreign policy and trade agreements in the eighteenth century to discriminatory immigration laws in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. China’s meaning in the American popular imagination changed, with Chinese porcelain itself coming to connote tacky crockery.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“Porcelain thus connoted both hardness and plasticity, old-world beauty and new-world technology, fragile daintiness and insensate coolness: a mixture of antithetical symbolic meanings that are then ascribed to, indeed, become the very “stuff” of Asiatic femininity.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“In short, race making in the nineteenth century is also an artisanal project, as indebted to ornamental practice and material making as it is to the pseudobiology of early ethnography.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“More than economic or social values, Chinese porcelain personifies a set of affective and somatic values forged out of the kiln of what Gordon Chang aptly calls the centuries-old “fateful ties” between China and the West.13 Out of the era of the China Trade, Atlantic slavery, and their aftermath, we see the birth of a material culture that shapes the physical and affective values attached to racialized bodies. Objects and materials are racialized, yes, but objects and materials also racialize people.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“Although Semper, an amateur ethnographer, may have been influenced by primitivist and Orientalist imaginations, he also came to see the history of ornament as the breakdown of ethnography, by understanding ornaments not as pristine cultural or national signifiers but instead as “portable ecology”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“Directional ornaments not only follow and enhance bodily movements but also dynamically represent what today we would call prosthetic possibilities by expanding the bodily periphery with inanimate objects.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“Shine mobilizes the interstitiality between sight and feeling, visuality and textuality.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“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).”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“one of the most fascinating aspects of this case must be the question of what constitutes “visual evidence” and how racialized femininity impacts and alters that assumption.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“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.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“Ostensibly about protecting laborers and women, the goal was in fact to, in Horace Page’s words, “end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women,” making it quite clear that gender and race were significant factors in immigration policy and that there was tremendous anxiety over and backlash against the Supreme Court’s decision in Chy Lung.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“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.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“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.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“I offer the yellow woman here not as the real but rather as a conceptual category and a critical agent,”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“The goals of taking this insidious elision between the Oriental and the ornamental as the foundation for a yellow feminist theory are, therefore: (1) to detach us from the ideal of a natural and an agential personhood that invariably accompanies critiques of power and from which the Asiatic woman is already always foreclosed; (2) to take seriously what it means to live as an object, an aesthetic supplement; (3) to attend to peripheral and alternative modes of ontology and survival; (4) and finally, to contend that the discourse of Asiatic femininity—at once pervasive and marginal, enhancing and disparaging, dated and yet contemporary—is part of a much larger debate about beauty and violence, as well as about life and artificiality, nestled in the making of modern Euro-American personhood.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“Orientalism is a critique, ornamentalism a theory of being.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism

“The making of personhood through synthetic assemblage or accretion can be impoverishing and additive. It can produce a person-assemblage that destroys autonomy but one that disrupts the privileged notion of natural bodies as well.”
― Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism