Join us for a discussion between curator Danielle Wu and Anne Anlin Cheng on the vibrant and reverberating implications of Cheng’s recently published book, Ornamentalism. Focusing on the cultural and philosophic conflation between the “oriental” and the “ornamental,” this study offers an original and sustained theory about Asiatic femininity in western culture. Drawing from and speaking to the multiple fields, from critical race theory to visual culture, Ornamentalism investigates what it is like to exist as a “person-thing” within the contradictions of American life.

Seating is extremely limited. If you are unable to attend, the event will be live-streamed and recorded.

Anne Anlin Cheng is a Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Princeton University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who works at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, drawing from literary theory, critical race studies, film theory, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis. She works primarily with twentieth-century American literature and visual culture with special focus on Asian American and African American literatures. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Assimilation, Psychoanalysis, and Hidden Grief (Oxford University Press), a study of the notion of racial grief at the intersection of culture, history, and law. Her second book Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press), excavates the story of the unexpected intimacy between modern architectural theory and the invention of a modernist style and the conceptualization of black skin at the turn of the twentieth century. Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press) is her most recent book.