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 19th 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 (20th 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 21st 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.