Reviewed by: Ornamentalism by Anne Anlin Cheng Ju Yon Kim Ornamentalism. Anne Anlin Cheng. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 204. $31.95 (cloth). The top of a mesmerizing red dress by fashion designer Valentino adorns the book jacket for Anne Anlin Cheng's Ornamentalism. Embroidered on fine mesh, glittery red beads form an intricate pattern of organic, abstract shapes, with the exception of five rectangles below the collar that stand out like a brand. Although the fullness of the top suggests a person or a mannequin holding its shape, the absence of a head and the apparent transparence of the garment give the impression that the dress encases a ghost—or, perhaps, animates itself. The dress draws viewers close, eliciting a desire to touch the glinting embroidery. Its uncanny fullness, however, its almost-liveness, simultaneously intensifies this appeal and prompts uneasiness. What lies just beneath this ornate dress: flesh, plastic, or air? Although Cheng does not dwell at length on this garment in the text of Ornamentalism, it exemplifies one of many images carefully arranged across the book that powerfully support its theory of the yellow woman. In particular, the cover image captures the ostensible contradictions embodied by this hybrid figure, a figure that is "present/absent, organic/synthetic, a figure of civilizational value and a disposable object of decadence" (xii). As Cheng stresses, the yellow woman is fabrication not just because she is a false representation of Asian women, but also because she is constituted by fabric, by what clothes and decorates her. In her intimate relationship to adornment, the yellow woman is simultaneously prized and deemed superfluous. Focusing on ornament rather than skin as the site of both objectifying racialization and suggestive glimmers of new forms of agency and sociality, including relationships among things and persons, Cheng elaborates a theory of the yellow woman that extends Edward Said's foundational work on Orientalism and insists on the significance of this figure to conceptions of modern personhood as well as modernist aesthetics. Ornamentalism's theoretical claims are immediately compelling and persuasive. The figure that Cheng describes is so longstanding and ubiquitous that the lack of theoretical interest is—as this text helps us see—a remarkable omission. Even as widely influential theories of Black [End Page 189] womanhood have emerged, they have prompted little effort to develop comparable paradigms about Asian racialization. Cheng connects this absence to the ambivalent status of yellow womanhood, "a condition of denigration and violence that peculiarly and insistently speaks through the language of aesthetic privilege. Is the yellow woman injured—or is she injured enough?" (xi). If yellowness is objectified, it is also concurrently aestheticized, thus afforded value through its intimacy with things. The impulse to theorize flesh and injury must grapple with the uncertainty of both flesh and injury when it encounters the ornamental skin of the yellow woman. Ornamentalism builds on the rich analysis of race developed in Cheng's previous two books, The Melancholy of Race (2001) and Second Skin (2013), and evinces her abiding concern with Black and yellow racializations and cultural productions, often in relation to each other. As Cheng explains, Ornamentalism naturally emerged from the latter text's ruminations on the entanglements between modernism's interest in surfaces and what she argues was Josephine Baker's performance, rather than simple uncovering, of Black skin. Through a shared interest in theorizing skin as a kind of adornment, Second Skin and Ornamentalism illuminate how modernism's aesthetic positions on surfaces, forms, and ornaments cannot be disassociated from racialized conceptions of the same. Cheng emphasizes that she is not interested in setting a "real" Asian woman against the figure of the yellow woman. Ornamentalism instead sketches a model of personhood that troubles the line between (natural) humans and (fabricated) things, and that stands in contrast to the figure of the organic modern individual, implicitly or explicitly understood as masculine and white. Entering the terrain of the new materialisms, Cheng's book makes the case for centering racialization even, or rather, especially, in studies that decenter the human: as she cogently puts it, "the crisis between persons and things has its origins in and remains haunted by the material, legal...
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Jan 12, 2024
Lynnette Arnold 
Open Access