Ornamentalism and the Yellow Woman: An Exploration of Synthetic Personhood

Introduction: Ornamentalism and the Yellow Woman

This study explores the concept of the "yellow woman" as a figure embodying a fusion of synthetic objecthood and organic personhood, challenging traditional understandings of race and identity. It investigates how this figure, ornamental and aesthetic, complicates notions of agency, embodiment, and subjecthood within Western culture.

The Absence in Critical Theory

Despite being a common trope in sexist and racist denigration, the yellow woman is largely absent from critical theory. This absence highlights a gap between Asian American feminist activism and theoretical writing, leading to a sense of critical fatigue and a suspicion of Western, universalizing theory.

The Fact of Yellowness

Unlike the "fact of blackness," which has been extensively theorized, the "fact of yellowness" remains an unexamined myth, lacking critical stature and dismissed due to its perceived cultural capital. This necessitates a closer look at the complexities inherent in the figuration of the yellow woman.

Agency and Complicity

The yellow woman presents a challenge to contemporary feminist and racial discourse, which often centers on the "injured flesh." Her survival through abstract and synthetic means, rather than organic ones, raises questions about the relationship between agency and complicity, anti-essentialism and authenticity, and affirmation and reification.

Perihumanity and Synthetic Accretions

The concept of "perihumanity" is introduced to describe the Asiatic woman's ambiguous position in relation to ideals of the human and the feminine. Drawing a parallel to Monique Allewaert's concept of "parahumanity" in the context of Africans and Afro-Americans, the study examines how the yellow woman's body is encrusted with synthetic accretions, blurring the division between the living and the nonliving.

Alternative Track to Western Personhood

By confronting the life of a subject who lives as an object, the study aims to uncover an alternative path within the making of modern Western personhood. This path deviates from the traditional ideal of a biological, organized, and masculine body, instead focusing on the synthetic, aggregated, feminine, and non-European.

Ornamentalism as a Theoretical Frame

The theoretical framework of "ornamentalism" is introduced to shift focus to the peripheral and supplemental, exploring the transitive properties of persons and things. This framework seeks to track the incarnations of Asiatic femininity in Western modernity and its entanglement with the ornamental and the Oriental.

The Aesthetics of Superfluity

The yellow woman embodies what Achille Mbembe calls the "aesthetics of superfluity," a fragile mediation between indispensability and expendability that characterizes labor and life in the context of imperialism and global movements of bodies and things. This concept highlights the broader genealogy within the making of modern Western personhood.

The Yellow Woman: A Constellation of Names and Meanings

The yellow woman is identified by various names, each carrying its own connotations. Rather than viewing this overnaming as a source of confusion, the study proposes a different grammar that embraces the hybridity of ornamental Asiatic femininity. It challenges the notion of Western modern personhood as exclusively organic, individualistic, masculine, and white, arguing that it has always been intertwined with a history of nonpersons.

Synthetic Asiatic Femininity

Synthetic Asiatic femininity is presented as a constitutive strand in the making of modern personhood, akin to the black enslaved body. The study questions what happens when ornamental forms and fungible surfaces, rather than organic flesh, are considered foundational terms in the process of race making.

Beyond Epidermal Schema and Hieroglyphics of the Flesh

Existing frameworks for conceptualizing racial embodiment, such as Frantz Fanon’s "epidermal racial schema" and Hortense Spillers’s "hieroglyphics of the flesh," are examined for their limitations in addressing the peculiar materiality of Asiatic, female flesh. The yellow woman, encrusted by representations and persistently sexualized, calls for a new theoretical approach.

Bare Flesh vs. Artificial Ornament

The study contrasts Sarah "Saartjie" Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, with Afong Moy, the Chinese Lady, to illustrate the difference between bare flesh and artificial ornament in the representation of racialized femininity. While black femininity has been reduced to "transitional mere flesh," yellow femininity has been presented as "portable supraflesh."

• Sarah "Saartjie" Baartman: Reduced to bare flesh, considered the "zero degree of social conceptualization."

• Afong Moy: Offered scopic pleasure centered on textual thickness and synthetic affinities.

Aesthetic Vocabularies and Racial Identities

The aesthetic vocabularies of bare flesh and artificial ornament are both racialized but do not necessarily index racial identities. The dominant trope of "black female flesh" has sometimes obscured black female bodies that have thrived through unfleshliness. The study aims to move beyond a naturalized difference between Africanist and Asiatic femininities.

Historical and Artistic Context

The tying of ornamental artifice to Asiatic femininity in Euro-American visual and literary cultures has a long history, dating back to Plato and continuing through various artistic movements and cultural expressions. This vast archive provides a rich context for understanding the construction of synthetic personhood.

The Production of Synthetic Personhood

Oppositional concepts like authenticity versus illusion and interiority versus surface are inadequate for addressing the political, racial, and ontic complications of a human figure that emerges as and through ornament. Asiatic femininity is presented as a style that claims specificity but lends itself to promiscuous transferability.

Race as a Dream of Embodiment

Race is described as a "dream of embodiment" that speaks through abstract forms. This insight leads to a reconceptualization of the ontological terms of human fleshliness, challenging politically treasured notions of agency, feminist enfleshment, and human ontology.

The Ornament: Denigration and Entanglement

The history and discourse of racialized femininity are intertwined with the philosophical history of the ornament, which has often been denigrated as insignificant, superfluous, and excessive. Despite this denigration, the ornament has also been associated with material worth and has triggered debates about essence, surface, and value.

Modernism and the Ornament

Modernism's minimalist revolution, with its de-ornamentation, can be seen as a continuation of the ancient apprehension about the seduction of the ornament. However, the rejection of the ornament is also a myth, as it continues to thrive in modern aesthetic practices, particularly in relation to racial and gendered demarcations.

Racialization and Orientalization of the Ornament

While the gendered nature of the discourse of the ornament has been noted, less attention has been paid to its racialization and Orientalization. Since antiquity, the ornament has been associated with the Oriental and the Asiatic, influencing aesthetic debates and the construction of modern, masculinist, and nationalist Euro-American aesthetic character.

The Asiatic Ornament as a Battleground

The Asiatic ornament and its impulse flourished in the early twentieth century, encompassing a discourse of racial difference that animates modernist thinking about gender, nationhood, and the human. The minor aesthetic category of Asiatic feminine ornamentality becomes a battleground for struggles over beauty, racial and gender difference, and the boundary of the human.

The Ornament: Racialized Artifact, Aesthetic Crisis, and Prosthetic Humanness

The ornament resonates as a racialized material artifact, a linchpin in modernism's aesthetic crisis, a struggle over the superfluity of persons and things, and a problem about prosthetic humanness. The discourse surrounding the ornament reveals a struggle with the problem of beauty and its relationship to horror and defilement.

The Yellow Woman: Artistic Investment and Racial Denigration

The yellow woman embodies the privileges and penalties of being an aesthetic being. Aesthetics and violence distort the borders between subject and object, consumer and consumed, raising questions about agency, consent, and embodiment. The intersection of beauty and terror, immateriality and corporeality, and life and privation is central to the figure of the yellow woman.

Defiance of Objectification and the Intimacy of Personhood and Thingness

This study pursues bodies that refuse their imputed ontology or embodiment, or that never get these options. The book explores defiance of objectification resulting in more objectness, altering the logic of racial embodiment and challenging assumptions about personhood and its indebtedness to objecthood. It seeks to build a historiography of raced bodies constructed through fabrics, ornaments, and "skins" that never enjoyed the fantasy of organicity.

Ornamentalism: A Conceptual Framework

Ornamentalism is proposed as a conceptual framework for approaching a history of racialized person-making through synthetic inventions and ornamentations. It names the conjoined presences of the Oriental and the ornamental and describes the processes through which personhood is conceived through ornamental gestures.

Orientalism vs. Ornamentalism

While art historians have used "ornamentalism" to refer to the deployment of ornament for decorative purposes, this study aims to resuscitate its resonance with Orientalism. Ornamentalism is presented as a theory of being, naming the perihumanity of Asiatic femininity and describing a condition of subjective coercion and discipline. However, it can also provoke considerations of alternative modes of being and action.

The Dichotomies of Race and Social Justice

The political stakes of "ornamentalist personhood" emerge beyond traditional dichotomies such as subject/object and agency/oppression. Ornamentalism asks how racial personhood can be assembled through synthetic inventions and attachments, addressing bodies that do not seek humanity and repel attempts to equip them with interiority.

Alchemy Between Persons and Things

Ornamentalism names the alchemy between things and persons, addressing the ways in which things have been taken for persons and how this impacts ideas about human ontology and aliveness. The goals of taking this elision between the Oriental and the ornamental as the foundation for a yellow feminist theory are outlined.

• (1) Detach from the ideal of a natural and agential personhood.

• (2) Take seriously what it means to live as an object.

• (3) Attend to peripheral and alternative modes of ontology and survival.

• (4) Contend that the discourse of Asiatic femininity is part of a larger debate about beauty and violence.

Afong Moy: A Case Study in Ornamentalism

The image of Afong Moy, the Chinese Lady, is revisited to illustrate the difference between Orientalism and ornamentalism. While psychoanalytic and Marxist perspectives offer insights into lack, compensation, and commodification, ornamentalism attends to the animation of the scene and the dynamic exchange between persons and things. The subject is the tableau vivant, transforming life into the paradox of still life.

The Interchangeability of Persons and Things

The scene with Afong Moy offers a fantasy about the interchangeability of persons and things, with the woman accessorizing the furnishings and vice versa. This highlights the porousness between persons and things and the allure of ontological shallowness. Commodification and fetishization do not ask the harder question of what constitutes being at the interface of ontology and objectness.

The Materialism and Materiality of Yellow Decorativeness

The peculiar materialism and materiality of "yellow decorativeness" press for a reconsideration of the facticity of racialized presence. The yellow woman challenges us to formulate a humane politics that accommodates artifice and objectness. The study aims to bring to light moments when ornaments become skin and flesh and when artificial matter animates the human.

Ornamental Personhood and the Margins of Modernity

Ornamental personhood points to a different genealogy of modern personhood, located at the encrusted edges of defiled, feminine, ornamented bodies. The study does not attempt to secure redemptive agency or offer up the real as an antidote to misrepresentations but instead takes seriously the imbrication among femininity, the ornamental, and the Oriental.

Transnational American Racial Modernity

The subjects and objects in this project are primarily American, but the study speaks to transnational American racial modernity, recognizing that the Asiatic/Asian American femininity under consideration is a product of ties among America, Asia, and imperial Britain. The trope of Asiatic femininity circulating in mainstream American culture remains remarkably fixed.

The Yellow Woman as a Conceptual Category

The yellow woman is offered not as the real but as a conceptual category and a critical agent, with the understanding that the term's origin derives from a racist framework. The chapters that follow move historically and additively, tracking the varied manifestations of ornamentalism from the mid-nineteenth century to the twenty-first.

Modalities of Asiatic Ornamentality

Each chapter is devoted to a particular modality of Asiatic ornamentality and its critical labor in the construction of Western personhood in various registers, including law, cinema, fashion, food, and technology. Ornamentalism operates as a critical lens for tracing the fluctuations between subjects and objects, persons and things.

An Archaeology of Radiant Things

The seemingly atavistic eruptions of Asiatic femininity in American law and culture enable the imagining of the inorganic as ontologically durable. This study aims to reveal ornamental personhood as an intimate sister to modern personhood, challenging accepted notions of Orientalism, primitivism, and modernism.