Citing the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2015 exhibition, China: Through the Looking Glass, Anne Anlin Cheng espouses the conceptualization of a “theory of person thingness” through which Asian women can be de-objectified and regain the actuality of personhood (415). In order to expose us to the limits of our present understanding of how to read and engage the racialized body, Cheng argues that “yellow women,” as she refers to female Asian bodies, have been dislodged of their personhood and subsequently kept from it through exoticized object representations which have not only served to stand-in for the Asian body, but have also made the actual body represented no longer necessary as it has been accounted and answered for through the representation.
Cheng’s use of the China: Through the Looking Glass exhibit, a museum-curated fashion show implicating the Euro-Western gaze, serves her argument by instantiating the dehumanizing and object-centered/subject-dislodging process at the heart of her preoccupation. Cheng makes the claim that pottery, vases, china, porcelain, and ornately-patterned fabrics and material not only point to an Asia of delicate luxury, but have also come to represent Asian femininity and Euro-Western expectations of both luxury and femininity. These artifacts, and their metonymic use, are what Cheng describes as ornamentalism. However, as these stand-ins are recognized more and more, the bodies they represent rendered more ‘recognizable,’ at the same time, those very bodies are made less necessary. This animated expectation of personhood also empties “the yellow woman” of agency, meaning, and real personhood (415).
As compelling a claim as Cheng, a professor of English at Princeton, makes, her argument is also filled with dense, occasionally obtuse wording, which often disorients the reader. This disorientation dislodges the reader from the reading, in effect mirroring the ways in which the subject of her arguments is dislodged from—and even made alien to—herself. Synechdochized, imbricated, nachtraglichtkeit, are among the heavily-weighted terms which an average reader would stumble on. However, another word—one of utmost importance in understanding Cheng’s argument—is ontology. As ontology refers to the very nature of being, which is precisely what is at stake for Cheng in this article, it is a term of paramount importance for the reader to remain focused and clear about.
Despite these weighty terms, and not without its own problematics, however, Cheng’s “Ornamentalism,” a term intentionally evocative of Edward Said’s “orientalism,” grants a much-needed addition, if not entrée, into a discourse which brings objectifying and humanity-dislodging processes into clear relief and begs the reader to consider these processes for what they are. Before entering a “theory of personhood” which raises implicates the view and reception of the “yellow woman,” we are first shown how she has been dismembered, and the importance of restoring personhood finds its vitality in this very attendance, for which we are indebted to Cheng.
Work Cited:
Cheng, Anne Anlin. “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman.” Critical Inquiry. Vol. 44, No. 3, February 2018. Pp. 415-46.