Ornamentalism. By Anne Anlin Cheng. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. xiv, 204 pp.

ISBN: 9780190604615 (cloth). The Journal of Asian Studies, 79(2), 555-556. doi:10.1017/
S0021911820000704

Ornamentalism
by Anne Anlin Cheng (2018, Oxford University Press)

To introduce the theory of ornamentalism, let me quote just several definitions, given by the
author of the book. Ornamentalism is: “a feminist theory of and for the yellow woman”; “a
conceptual framework for approaching a history of racialized person-making, not through
biology but through synthetic inventions and ornamentations”; “the making of personhood
through synthetic assemblage”; it “names the perihumanity of Asian femininity, a peculiar state
of being produced out of the fusion between “thingness” and “personness” (ibid: 17-18)
Cheng builds her theoretical framework of “Ornamentalism” on an existing body of scholarships
of sartorial performance and self-decoration, and on a critique of Orientalism, proposed by Said.
She empathises that “orientalism” is a critique, while “ornamentalism” is a theory, and places her
understanding of agency on the borders of ontology and survival. (ibid: 18-19). She draws
special attention to the phenomena of “one treating themselves as a thing,” rather than “one treats
the others as a thing” (ibid: 19). Aiming to deconstruct ideas of natural and an agential
personhood, Cheng asks what it means to live as an object, an aesthetic supplement, to study
peripheral and alternative modes of ontology and survival, and she aims to place the discourse of
Asiatic femininity as a part of a larger debate of Euro-American personhood (ibid: 20)

Although I appreciated that the author pays attention to the role of both humans and things in
assemblages constituting ‘subjecthood’, and especially the role of ornaments and aesthetics in it,
developing the concept of “prosthetic humanness” in the context of Asia, I didn’t see any specific
interventions, moreover, I felt that the author overlooked some significant works in the
scholarships on which she was building her theory of ornamentalism.
In her statement that a ‘yellow woman’ wasn’t theorized in critical theory (ibid: 1), Cheng
overlooks the influential book “The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism” by Tani Barlow
(2004), one of the leading scholars in Chinese feminist studies, where she specifically studies
genealogy of a notion “Chinese woman”. While speaking of ontology and ‘thingness’ of Chinese
women, and decoupling the binaries, such as subject/object, interiority/exteriority, agency/
oppression (ibid: 19), Cheng doesn’t mention a seminal article “Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna
Haraway, where Haraway discussed how technologies, culture and nature constitute and at the
same time decouple the notions of gender and personhood.
In her search for genealogy of modern personhood of Asian women, Cheng brings into her
theory the notion of synthetic being. What does the author mean by synthetic assemblages of
personhood? She poetically calls this phenomena “alchemy between things and persons” (ibid:
19). However, Cheng doesn’t mention Bruno Latour, one of the most significant scholars of
‘ontological turn’ who developed actor-network theory, including the term ‘assemblages’. Thus,
although the theory of “Ornamentalism” has a great theoretical potential, I felt that it wasn’t

placed into existing scholarships of Chinese feminism and ‘ontological turn’ that studies roles of
things in the social world. Additionally, the author uses too much of the theoretical jargon that
complicates the understanding and in my opinion does not aline with feminist attempt of making
feminist theory public and accessible for a reader outside of academia.
Before reading the article, I expected that Cheng will be elaborating on the very role of an
ornament, which is, as I imagined, as skin, or as in Adobe acrobat program, puts layers of
meanings onto a figure of a person, thus constituting race, class and gender, and thingness of the
personhood, but perhaps Cheng wrote about it in other chapters, and I am excited to discover it
in my further reading of “Ornamentalism”.