Hillel, Winnick Chapel, 80 Brown Street
How does retrieving the ornamental logic of Orientalism impact how we think about race, personhood, and modernism? In her talk, Professor Anne Cheng will explore the meeting of violence and beauty and ask what kind of life subsists as broken or superfluous things. Through a series of readings of literary, legal, and visual texts, her talk will isolate instances of dark, miraculous moments when ornaments become flesh.
Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English and of the Center for African American Studies, and the incoming Director for the Program in American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Melancholoy of Race: Assimilarion, Psychoanalysis, and Hidden Grief (Oxford University Press) and Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press).
Sponsored by the Department of English and the Zucker Family Fund, and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA).