Anne Anlin Cheng, a distinguished Professor of English, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies at Princeton University, stands at the intersection of literature, cultural scholarship, and critical theory. Born in Taiwan, Cheng immigrated to the United States and has become a trailblazer in interdisciplinary academia and a pronounced voice in public discourse. Her intellectual scholarship, grounded firmly in her Masters in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, focuses on the uncomfortable intersection between politics, race, and aesthetics. Drawing broadly from the fields of linguistics, visual media, film theory, legal studies, and psychoanalysis, Cheng’s humanitarian investigations transcend pedagogical borders to shape her intellectual imagination functions.
In her writings, Anne Cheng synthesizes cultural inheritances, structures, and dynamics from both historical and contemporary lenses on Asian American and African American identities. She is the author of three books: The Melancholy of Race, Second Skin, and Ornamentalism, which impelled an upcoming exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum on Chinoiserie opening in 2025. Her works have been published in prominent scholarly journals such as Critical Inquiry, Representations, Camera Obscura, etc., as well as in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, and The Washington Post.
Specifically, Anne Cheng’s Ornamentalism communicates a theory of being that contours the scope of ornamentation’s intersection with Orientalist logic and personhood. With a uniquely nuanced Asian American perspective that interrogates the white gaze, Ornamentalism poses questions regarding the distinctive ways in which Asiatic femininity is imagined, visualized, adorned, and submerged through the minute, the sartorial, the decorative, and the prosthetic. Referencing Hortense Spillers, she deducts:
Since the black female is barred from crossing the symbolic threshold into personification, she is stuck on the threshold dividing the human and the not human, rendering her ‘vestibular to culture.’ Where black femininity is vestibular, Asiatic femininity is ornamental (6).
Cheng goes on with this observational framework to critique the visual histories of the Western world and exposes its colonial ideological semantics in The Chinese Lady, an art print by Afong Moy. Afong Moy, at the age of fourteen, was the “inaugural” Chinese female figure in the United States. Imported by merchant traders, the Carne Brothers, and later taken over by P. T. Barnum to tour major US cities in the 1830s–1850s as a living museum tableau, Moy’s embodied exhibition was not only a means to market various oriental goods but also a spectacle of “scopic pleasure” (Cheng 5). In Ornamentalism, Cheng elucidates how the displacement of the Chinese lady’s interiority by “silk, damask, mahogany, and ceramics alongside which she sits” accentuates the commodified allure of her figure—she is sexualized not purely through the rhetoric of the festering naked flesh but from her decorative, and ontologically projected, exotic artificiality. While this staging of exoticism adapted to suit colonial fantasies that promoted the commercialization of her managers’ merchandise and influenced poetry and fashion trends, it also widely contributed to the shaping of the American public’s mutable perceptions of China centered on Moy’s material, transferable, and synthetic affinities.
What does Anne Cheng’s contextualization of The Chinese Lady mean regarding her mark as a public intellectual? In “Are Public Intellectuals a Thing of the Past,” Professor Stephen Mack quotes Jean Bethke Elshtain:
The public intellectual needs, it seems to me, to puncture the myth-makers of any era, including his own, whether it's those who promise that utopia is just around the corner if we see the total victory of free markets worldwide, or communism worldwide or positive genetic enhancement worldwide, or mouse-maneuvering democracy worldwide, or any other run-amok enthusiasm. Public intellectuals, much of the time at least, should be party poopers.
By unveiling the myth of Ornamentalism and its aesthetic language in the portraiture, Cheng “poops” on its pseudo-honorific functions and pinpoints the grotesque fluctuations between beauty and decay that inhibit the artwork’s conflation with American commodity culture. She sheds light on the “trauma porn” within The Chinese Lady, with her tiny little feet that peep out under her pantalettes alluding to foot-binding, a Chinese tradition in which women had their four smaller toes tucked underneath the feet pulled towards the heel, and wrapped in bandages that would eventually fester with dead skin, blisters, blood, and pus. Cheng’s scholarship brilliantly punctures visual media’s stagnant, exhaustive classification of Asiatic femininity and its incessant perverse desire to taste exoticness, purity, and mystery, and thus generates ethical and intellectual clarity in the spaces where debilitating ignorance lies.
As a co-founder of the American Studies Collaboratory, or Col(LAB), Anne Cheng fosters interdisciplinary research and pedagogical partnerships across campuses. Hosting pop-up labs that unite scholars and students from the humanities and social sciences, Cheng promotes investigations on how identity and citizenship intersect and are shaped by law, the arts, literature, cuisine, sexuality, and space. Particularly, she lifts the curtains on US histories and nuances in language. In “The ‘Decline’ of the Public Intellectual,” Mack introduces Richard Posner’s claim that “the arts and humanities should be kicked out of public intellectualdom.” He then presents William Dean’s counterargument:
(Posner) disregard(s) public intellectuals who discuss public philosophies and attitudes. These public intellectuals sometimes uncover implicit orientations and worldviews that, in turn, affect public decisions and actions. For example, he ignores the fact that there is an American spiritual culture, that religious thinkers can criticize and affect that spiritual culture, and that they can thereby make a difference in American public practice.
Anne Cheng is a public intellectual who criticizes and affects preexisting public philosophies and attitudes surrounding racial formation, histories, and language in the United States. In Ornamentalism, she enunciates how Chinese female bodies were subjected to importation, entrapment in cramped ships for month-long voyages to the US, and consequent “uncertain detention and even imprisonment” during the 19th and early 20th centuries (Cheng 40). Chinese female immigration, or plainly speaking, importation, was painted as an evil, unarmed invasion of the United States. Yet while The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited immigrants from naturalized citizenship and isolated Chinese American women into sex work, “any unaccompanied woman of any age, marital status, or background” also faced the possibility of being questioned as a potential public charge based on alleged health threats rooted in “medicalized nativism” (Lee 42, 39).
Cheng’s humanitarian inquiry into this quotidian constraint of Chinese female mobility uncovers implicit US orientations that speak to more than simply gender inequality—she pinpoints the simultaneous hyper-sexualization and marginalization of the Chinese female figure who is doubly subject to socio-political forms of erasure. Piercingly, she discloses the opposite end of such historical abhorrence and isolation: inexplicable allure. In Ornamentalism, she writes that the “yellow woman” has been generously christened many monikers: “Celestial Lady, Lotus Blossom, Dragon Lady, Yellow Fever, Slave Girl, Geisha, Concubine, Butterfly, China Doll, Prostitute. She is carnal and delicate, hot and cold, corporeal and abstract, a full and empty signifier” (Cheng 4). The irreducible defamation enacted upon Chinese American women can almost be ignored; these pseudonyms are so very pretty. But Cheng unmasks that what lies deeper in one’s name is what it contains—when colonial “truths” plunder and misconstrue Asiatic beauty, its offspring is ugly, and its ugliness raw and unfiltered. Piercingly, she evaluates the position of Chinese American women in history, exiled from her homeland to the West, as both commodity and afflicted agent of the Orient within her newfound global economy. Her intellectual scholarship on the arts, humanities, and language discusses the denaturalization of Chinese American femininity, skin, and features as a product of the shattering white gaze and by its own nature demands public societal reflection.
Additionally, as the founder and organizer of Critical Encounters, Anne Cheng cultivates dialogue between art and theory and stimulates cross-disciplinary discourse on social justice. Her past programs have featured a collaborative student reenactment of the Minoru Yasui Trial alongside Appellate Court Judge Denny Chin, a debate on bioethics between the editor of Nature magazine and Charis Thompson, a screening of new oeuvres by internationally acclaimed filmmaker Isaac Julien in conversation with Eduardo Cadava, an academic exchange between playwrights Jorge Ignacio Cortinas and Young Jean Lee, and more. In “The Wicked Paradox,” Mack concludes:
Trained to it or not, all participants in self-government are duty-bound to prod, poke, and pester the powerful institutions that would shape their lives. And so if public intellectuals have any role to play in a democracy—and they do—it’s simply to keep the pot boiling. The measure of public intellectual work is not whether the people are listening, but whether they’re hearing things worth talking about.
Taken together, Cheng’s life and career epitomize one of a public intellectual. Not only does she build upon race and gender theorists such as Saidiya Hartman, Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, and Hortense Spillers to “keep the pot boiling” and place the Asian American body politic into a locale of deterritorializations and reterritorializations, but she also actively encourages educational circles to conceptually and visually contemplate on hegemonies that subjugate and shape their individual lives. Cheng’s scholarly achievements do not entertain neat theoretical compartmentalization or simplistic philosophies. Rather, she nurtures environments that “prod, poke, and pester” conventional, dominant institutions and disturb allocations of power within the public to incite relentless introspection on social, sexual, and political principles.
Anne Anlin Cheng’s explications and admonishments on the paradigm of oriental fetishism in visual media, the expansive history of Chinese exclusion, and the systematic oppression behind linguistic structures and norms ultimately work to attend to the petrification of the female Oriental body. Addressing essential issues in contemporary society on a trans-Pacific scale, Cheng unleashes the crisis of self-determinism and mobility within Asiatic bodies. She inspires me to ask myself, what if we were to attend to the decolonization, reanimation, and humanization of Ornamentalism? Where would I begin? How would I proceed? And that right there, is her stamp of a truly remarkable public intellectual.
Works Cited
Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Lee, Erika. “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882-1924.” Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 21, no. 3, 2002, pp. 36–62, https://doi.org/10.2307/27502847.
Mack, Stephen. “Are Public Intellectuals a Thing of the Past?” The New Democratic Review. http://www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2012/08/are_public_inte.html.
Mack, Stephen. “The ‘Decline’ of the Public Intellectual.” The New Democratic Review. http://www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2015/08/the_decline_of_11.html.
Mack, Stephen. “The Wicked Paradox.” The New Democratic Review. http://www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2011/08/index.html.
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