Quotes from Anne Anlin Cheng

the ancient Greek word for adornment, kosmos, means both "decoration" and "world order." (This is, of course, why the words cosmetics and cosmology share an etymological root.)

the very premise of this project takes seriously, rather than simply decries, the intractable imbrication among femininity, the ornamental, and the Oriental, in order to explore the entanglement of living and living-as-thing.

Directional ornaments not only follow and enhance bodily movements but also dynamically represent what today we would call prosthetic possibilities by expanding the bodily periphery with inanimate objects.

Although Semper, an amateur ethnographer, may have been influenced by primitivist and Orientalist imaginations, he also came to see the history of ornament as the breakdown of ethnography, by understanding ornaments not as pristine cultural or national signifiers but instead as "portable ecology

The making of personhood through synthetic assemblage or accretion can be impoverishing and additive. It can produce a person-assemblage that destroys autonomy but one that disrupts the privileged notion of natural bodies as well.

Orientalism is a critique, ornamentalism a theory of being.

From the divergence between black flesh and yellow ornament, we have arrived at this convergence: flesh that passes through objecthood needs ornament to get back to itself.

R. John Williams calls the ongoing life of Orientalism in contemporary tech and corporate culture "Asia-as-technê," which he defines as "a compelling fantasy that would posit Eastern aesthetics as both antidote to and the perfection of machine cultures.

And our understanding of ourselves is deeply indebted to how we have imagined animality in the first place.

With Beijing Memory No. 5, what is uncanny is that the "machine" refuses to come to life, and in its lifelessness, imagines what life might have been. And it is in this very paradox of "might have been" that we experience the prospective and prosthetic quality of our ontology.

The curio, denoting a piece of bric-a-brac from the Far East since the mid-nineteenth century and a shortened form of the word curiosity, already draws something from the enchanted transformation of ornamentalism: the thing that becomes Thing—but, alas, never quite free from a threatening intimacy with its original status as a mere thing.24 This uneasy fluctuation between value and waste always haunts the curio, which is to say, haunts the "Oriental thing.

I offer the yellow woman here not as the real but rather as a conceptual category and a critical agent,

It is surely ironic to fuss over how fresh the fish being fed to him are and how "authentic" his tank vegetation is when he is isolated, held captive, and put on display. The ritual of care disguises the violence, just like the preparation of sushi itself.

The forensic use of visual evidence started not with the introduction of modern technologies like photography, but instead with the phantasmic construction of "illegible" and "foreign" bodies.

Apparently, as historian Paul Kramer dryly observes, "for California officials and in the eyes of the law, there is little difference between disability, immorality, and Chinese femininity.

Ostensibly about protecting laborers and women, the goal was in fact to, in Horace Page's words, "end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women," making it quite clear that gender and race were significant factors in immigration policy and that there was tremendous anxiety over and backlash against the Supreme Court's decision in Chy Lung.

The women were thus simultaneously dressed up and stripped down. The evidence of an overmaterialized and scopically available body emerges not out of bare flesh or real ornaments, but instead from their phantasmic conflation, an overlapping of surfaces located in teasing peripheries: the borders of a collar, the peep of a hem, the gleaming edge of a sleeve.

one of the most fascinating aspects of this case must be the question of what constitutes "visual evidence" and how racialized femininity impacts and alters that assumption.

Where 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 the human to escape his or her own humanness.

What happens when we accept that style, mediated through yet detached from a racial referent, may not be simply the excess or the opposite of ontology but may in fact be a precondition for embodiment, an insight that challenges the very foundation of the category of the human? What is at stake here is not just the objectification of people but also how that objectification opens up a constitutive estrangement within the articulation of proper personhood.

In short, race making in the nineteenth century is also an artisanal project, as indebted to ornamental practice and material making as it is to the pseudobiology of early ethnography.

Porcelain thus connoted both hardness and plasticity, old-world beauty and new-world technology, fragile daintiness and insensate coolness: a mixture of antithetical symbolic meanings that are then ascribed to, indeed, become the very "stuff" of Asiatic femininity.

We know by now that Asiatic femininity in the Western racial imagination has never needed the biological or the natural to achieve a full, sensorial, agile, and vivid presence. Asiatic femininity has always been prosthetic. The dream of the yellow woman subsumes a dream about the inorganic. She is an, if not the, original cyborg.

Dress designates civility and quotidian order, as Watt insightfully observes, but ornament designates a category of dress that is marginal, excessive, and nonutilitarian (that is, unlike dress that is required by civil society).