Day: October 16, 2019

here is the link to the event:  https://www.facebook.com/events/2702956013098872/  

If you don’t have facebook, the event is at 9pm on Friday, October 18th at Cayuga Lodge (630 Stewart Ave)

Home Is Far Away by. EPIK HIGH

Part of the lyrics goes as follows:

“The standards of the world is becoming like Everest
The more I go towards the top, stress builds up like a mountain
I know I can never rest
No sleeping pills to put my anxieties to sleep”

The song’s theme of leaving home behind, the emptiness and anxiety echo with migration, abusing the privilege of anxiety drugs in B-Mor and keeping up with the expectations in Charter villages. Similar to the dystopian society, the singer(s) speaks to the inability to rest in a high-pressured society.

“We must remind ourselves of what the reality is within those lovely confines, that along with the neatly paved streets and the spotless schools and the fancy shops offering uncontaminated goods from all over the globe comes the fact that very little is guaranteed for a Charter person, if anything at all, and that one must continually work and invest and have enough money to sustain a Charter lifestyle or else leave” (Lee 61).

In the dystopian setup, B-Mor resembles working-class collectivism in an autocracy, whereas Charter village presents an elitist lifestyle that highlights personal endeavor. These two seemingly stable worlds have underlying fragility. The narrator illustrates that “self-sacrifice is a hallmark of life here in B-Mor”(Lee 59). Fan destabilizes this hallmark of self-sacrifice by pursuing freedom and love. The narrator uses contrast to highlight the benefits in Charter village, which is a set of complimenting words including “neatly,” “spotless,” “fancy” and “uncontaminated.” The perfectness of Charter not only contrasts with the struggles in B-Mor and open countries but also compares with the monotone work ethic of “continually work and invest and have enough money to sustain.” The usage of two and’s to connect a series of efforts shows that the life at Charter is not much better than living in B-Mor: longevity doomed by the Crash, exhaustive work and the pressure of qualification. Since B-Mor runs on the promise of survival and Charter village exists on privileges, how does life differ in this dystopian society when the purpose is simply to sustain? Are B-Mor and Charter villages similar to the working class and middle-upper class in modern society? Is B-Mor similar to the Chinese regime even though the people of New China have already migrated to a new place?

Sherrie Chen (sc2289)

“This essay is driven by the haunting of a different kind of racialized female body whose “flesh” survives through abstract and synthetic rather than organic means and whose personhood is animated, rather than eviscerated, by aesthetic congealment. Culturally encrusted and ontologically implicated by representations, the yellow woman is persistently sexualized yet barred from sexuality, simultaneously made and unmade by the aesthetic project. She denotes a person but connotes a style, a naming that promises but supplants skin and flesh. Simultaneously consecrated and desecrated as an inherently aesthetic object, the yellow woman troubles the certitude of racial embodiment and jeopardizes the “fact” of yellowness, pushing us to reconsider a theory of person thingness that could accommodate the politics of a human ontology indebted to commodity, artifice, and objectless.”

-eviscerated: (v) deprive (something) of its essential content

-ontology: (n) philosophical study of being. More broadly, it studies concepts that directly relate to being, in particular becoming, existence, reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations.

-supplants: (v) supersede and replace

At the beginning portion of Cheng’s article on Ornamentalism, she discusses how society depicts “yellow women” and gives us some in depth details on the social construct through a vivid and complex use of word choice. Through two main literary devices, word choice and juxtaposition, she showcases the difficulties “yellow women” have to face everyday in displaying their personalities and courses of action, but also the complexity that comes with being a “yellow woman”.

Word Choice: Throughout this paragraph, Cheng uses specific words to describe “yellow women”. While she could have chosen simple words like deprive or replace, she instead uses words like eviscerated and supplants. This purposeful use of diction reveals not only the author’s plethora of diverse vocabulary but also insinuates that being a “yellow woman” is more than something simple but rather should be looked at as a complex ontology. Cheng not only uses these more complex words to describe what society negatively thinks, but also what society should positively think about “yellow women”. Because of this, she’s really conveys that although the world may look at “yellow women” in this simple way, there’s more to unfold and the layers deserve more intricate and elaborate views. It’s more of a spectrum of qualities to analyze and not just that construct society stereotypically placed on them.

Juxtaposition: Cheng uses a variety of opposites to describe the spectrum of what society sees in “yellow woman” and what they don’t want to see yet should have the rights to portray. Cheng says things like, “persistently sexualized yet barred from sexuality”, “made and unmade by the aesthetic project”, and “consecrated and desecrated as an inherently aesthetic object”. This use of juxtaposition does more than just explain what society does and does not want to see, it also showcases the difficulties that “yellow woman” have to deal with on a daily basis- the societal pressures they constantly have to face, which essentially contradict from their emotional, sexual, and individual freedoms. These juxtapositions show that this spectrum is hard to be in the middle in and is only looked at in society at one end of the spectrum or the other. Cheng brings up a great dilemma for the “yellow woman” of being in-between a rock and a hard place, which is expressed through the diction and contiguity in this passage.

This song is called “Porcelain” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It’s a slow groove; I thought that It would go well with Cheng’s deliberate positioning of ‘yellow womanhood’ with her theory of ornamentalism. The first two lines are:

Porcelain, are you wasting away in your skin?
Are you missing the love of your kin?

Which I think would go well Cheng’s adherence, or not shying away from, the hard considerations of personhood being understood primarily through material or and object like porcelain.

This is Miguel’s cover of the song; he does it justice, I think.

https://youtu.be/l48DPVyuGoA

Citation:

Anlin Cheng, Anne. “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman,” Critical Inquiry 44, no. 3 (Spring 2018): 415-446.

Thesis:

“ I offer ornamentalism as a conceptual lens through which to attend to the afterlife of a racialized and aestheticized object that remains very much an object…” 429

“ It is important to note that ornamentalism, as I am deploying it, does not refer to agential acts of self-performance or willful self-making. That is, as ornamentalism is a technology of personhood that mobilizes a racial logic that operates ornamentally rather than requiring—and often even suppressing—a biological body or nature, it is very different from a corpus of scholarship that sees sartorial practice as recuperative acts of self- naming or individualist performance. This is not a project about retrieving human agency, because the subject under discussion here (the yellow woman) is a seriously compromised subject and, in many instances, not a subject at all.” 429

Analysis:

In this article Cheng uses this opportunity to focus on another means of examining conceptual frameworks that speak to racial embodiment. Working off of scholars, Fanon and Spillers, she seeks to introduce another means of instructing an ‘otherized’ gaze to increase visual literacy connected to Asian or ‘yellow’ female bodies.

Beginning with the concept of the “hieroglyphics of the flesh”, Cheng uses this analogy to bring in conversations about the correlation between aesthetics and personhood. She curates and implements her own term ‘ornamentalism’ and places her theory to comment on the usefulness of constructions of the aesthetic to further understand the implementation of racial imaginaries to construct racial and gender biases. Focusing on Asiatic femininity, she uses the objectification and exoticization of Black femininity as a springboard to transfer and translate her ideas. Cheng speaks of using the lens of commodity and fetishism against itself. In this way, readers can begin to understand and process the racial, political purposes that guide the constructed imagery associated with a human figure. The ornament becomes the person and vise-versa.

Bringing together images of: late 19^th century European ‘Japonisme’ through the works of Whistler, through Impressionists such as Claude Monet, Art Nouveau illustrators such as Privat-Livemont, and also introduces early modern photography through her use of Genthe’s images of Chinese women. Her knowledge of the changes in ‘high art’ towards the turn of the century (20^th century) allow her to further her rhetorical analysis on the MET’s featured exhibition “China: Through the Looking Glass” in 2015. This amalgamation of aesthetic prowess provided Cheng with an opportunity to view many perspectives on the effects of Orientalism into the 21^st century. With very few, if any, historical specificities and a reliance on postmodernism to free the show from the responsibility of reckoning with historical or cultural inaccuracies, the show held a dazzling and ‘othering’ effect. Fashion, art, context were very much dependent on postmodernism to move away from the stringent philosophies connected to Enlightenment. Cheng marks this statement on page 427 where she writes “…this exhibit disaggregates aesthetic pleasure from politics and reclaim postmodernism as cure to Orientalism…” Thus, this excusal of museal curatorial ‘accountability’ leads to a critique of political and cultural culpability and of the inorganic and almost mechanic corporeality of what Cheng refers to as “yellow womanhood”.

It is after the contextualization of this exhibition and of this concept of “yellow womanhood” that the reader is finally presented with the thesis of the argument and the definition of her coined term ‘ornamentalism’. She writes “ I offer ornamentalism as a conceptual lens through which to attend to the afterlife of a racialized and aestheticized object that remains very much an object…” (429). She defines the term as a homophonic echo of Orientalism, coined by Edward Said in the mid 1970s, and states that it serves, for her, the “conjoined presences of oriental, the feminine, and the decorative” while also “identifying a process whereby personhood is conceived and suggested (legally, materially, and imaginatively) through ornamental gestures…” (429). The remainder of the argument is used to apply the term, ornamentalism, either towards specific cases of fashion installation pieces within the museum’s exhibition (focusing on the materiality of Chinese porcelain) or towards an critical conversation about them implementation of her ornamentalist theory towards representations of Black femininity. In that respect her briefly rounds out her argument with the inclusion Black females by questioning how discussions of grief, violence, and slavery can also be a commentary on the decoration of corporeal brutality.