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Nikos Stangos Memorial Lecture 2023: Professor Anne Anlin Cheng

24 May 2023, 5:30 pm–8:00 pm

Translated Vase TVW1 (2017) by Yeesookyung. Image courtesy of The Princeton University Art Museum.

Talk title - Strange Life: Apparitions of the Yellow Woman

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Queenie Lee – History of Art

Location

G06 Roberts Building
Sir Ambrose Fleming LT
London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

What is the racial logic behind the history of the ornament? When we braid the aesthetic and philosophic discourse of the ornament to one of the great racial imaginaries of our time, Orientalism, what we find is an archaeology of “Asiatic female thingliness.”  Rather than decrying this history of objectification, the negativity of which we take to be a given, let us take the next step and ask what it means to be a subject who survive as or through crushing objecthood.  How does the posthuman speak to feminist, critical race theory and practice?

This talks takes a series of inanimate objects that both hark to and refuse traces of the human and the racialized – cyborgs, monsters, and vases – as fulcrums through which to explore how racialized gender, specifically the specter of the yellow woman, animates the romance of pastness and fuels the designs of futurity, how this spectral figure enables the slippage between the human and the inhuman so foundational to the dream of modernity. 

Followed by a reception in: IAS Forum


Previous speakers include:

  • 2022 Jaś Elsner: "Presence, Absence and the Problems of Comparison: Archaeological Art History from Buddhism to Byzantium" - full details
  • 2021 Griselda Pollock: 'Monroe’s Mark: Why is a feminist art historian writing about a screen idol?' - full details
  • 2019 Martha Roslen: 'Representation, Dispossession, and the Conquest of Space: An Artist’s Talk'
  • 2018 Isaac Julien: 'Choreographing Capital'
  • 2017 Professor Caroline Walker Bynum: 'Holy Beds and Holt Families'
  • 2015 Professor Beatriz Colomina (Princeton University): 'X-Ray Architecture'
  • 2013 Professor Kaja Silverman: 'Unstoppable Development'
  • 2012 Professor Susan Buck-Morss (Cornell University): 'Seeing Global'
  • 2011 Professor TJ Clark (Visiting Professor, University of York): 'Do Landscapes have Identities?'
  • 2010 Professor Homi Bhabha (Harvard University): 'The Humanities and the Anxiety of Violence'
  • 2009 Professor Jacqueline Lichtenstein (Université Paris-Sorbonne Paris IV): 'The Philosopher and the Art Historian: An Impossible Dialogue'
  • 2008   Professor Molly Nesbit (Vassar): 'Light in Buffalo; Michel Foucault Lectures on Manet at the Albright-Knox, April 8, 1970'
  • 2007   Okwui Enwezor (Curator): 'Incarcerated Life: Contemporary Art and the Security State'
  • 2006   Professor Anne Wagner (University of California Berkeley): 'Nauman's Body of Sculpture'
  • 2005   William Kentridge (Artist): 'Reading Shadows: The Pleasures of Self-Deception'

About the Speaker

Professor Anne Anlin Cheng

Professor of English at Princeton University

Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English, and affiliated faculty in the Program in American Studies, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Committee on Film Studies. She is an interdisciplinary and comparative race scholar who focuses on the uneasy intersection between politics and aesthetics, drawing from literary theory, race and gender studies, film and architectural theory, legal studies, psychoanalysis, and critical food studies. She works primarily with twentieth-century American literature and visual culture with special focus on Asian American and African American literatures. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden GriefSecond Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface; and, most recently, Ornamentalism.  Her work has appeared in journals such as Critical InquiryRepresentationsPMLACamera ObscuraDifferences, among others. She is also a contributor to New York TimesThe AtlanticLos Angeles Review of Books, and Huffington Post.