ARTH 379 Postcolonial Theory in Art History: Ornamentalism: Feminist Theories of the Body

• Instructor: Dr. Balbir K. Singh

This class will provide a feminist of color approach to postcolonial theory within visual and material culture. Specifically, we focus on scholar Anne Anlin Cheng’s recent book Ornamentalism on Asian femme embodiment to define our course of study; by understanding Cheng’s analysis as foundational, this class will take up considerations of the body, race, matter, adornment, and technology through colonial, racial, and capitalist relations. Cheng’s work will necessitate readings of postcolonial theorist Edward Said, as well as Black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers. From there, we will build on such foundational work by focusing on reading our way through Cheng’s work as a textbook, building on our understanding of such a text through reading secondary sources and examining related works of art and cultural production. In this way, we will focus our postcolonial study through Asian diasporic feminisms as a way of reckoning with the significance of Asian women to the study of race, gender, sex, embodiment, ability, capacity, materialism, and affect. The stakes of this semester’s course of study are high, as we embark on better understanding how racialized and gendered embodiment through the figure of the Asian femme gives us new and essential frameworks in which to better understand race, racism, gender, sex, misogyny, and heteropatriarchy; for example, much of the work we examine will animate how we read forms of historic and ongoing anti-Asian racisms, as well as resistance to such racisms in the form of the recent movement to #StopAsianHate. Our class will survey the material histories of subjugation, war, and empire in and around Asia in ways that make apparent the racial and colonial systems that animate contemporary diasporic feminisms writ large. Ultimately, this class will ground our art historical investment in studying postcolonial histories in a way that focuses our attention on this particular intersectional figuration, examining work from Asian women and femmes globally, from cultural theory, critical ethnic studies, and contemporary art.