Ornamentalism-Anne Anlin Cheng
Different kind of racialised female bodies, Africanist and Asiatic femininities:
While primitivism rehearses the rhetoric of ineluctable flesh, Orientalism, by contrast, relies on a decorative grammar, a fantasmatic corporeal syntax that is artificial and layered. Where black femininity is “vestibular”/bare flesh/weighted, Asiatic femininity is ornamental/surface/portable
Living museum tableaux: Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman & Afong Moy
This sumptuous collection rehearses for the twenty-first-century audience the basic tenets of nineteenth-century Orientalism: that opulence and sensuality are the signature components of Asiatic character; that Asia is always ancient, excessive, feminine, available, and decadent; that material consumption promises cultural possession; that there is no room in the Orientalist imagination for national, ethnic, or historical specificities.
"To me the Orient is a matter of indifference"-Roland Barthes
Orientalism vs Ornamentalism:
Ornamentalism 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. Commodification and fetishization, the dominant critical paradigms we have for understanding representations of racialized femininity, simply do not ask the harder question of what being is at the interface of ontology and objectness. While Orientalism is about turning persons into things that can be possessed and dominated, ornamentalism is about a fantasy of turning things into persons through the conduit of racial meaning in order, paradoxically, to allow us to abandon our humanness.
To point to this enchantment of the inhuman is not to rehearse the problem of objectification or to downplay the issue of race but to point to a provocative dilemma about how the object preconditions, rather than being the product of, the human figure—a modern crisis that Asiatic femininity personifies. This is why ornamentalism is not only an object of feminist critique but can be also a vector of feminism. The to-be-used Chinese female body seems to have petrified into domestic and collectible things whose value now resides in their aggressive uselessness.
The body of labor (sexual, reproductive, economic) exemplified by the black female body—ungendered and excluded from the realms of kinship, state, and aesthetic value—is nonetheless not wholly alien to the practice and afterlife of ornamentalism.
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