Quotes About Ornamentalism

Orientalism is a critique, ornamentalism a theory of being.

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.

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.