CfP for AAACC Panel for SCS 2026
Yellow Gold: Ornamentalism, Antiquity, and the Asiatic Female
In the words of Anne Anlin Cheng, “Orientalism is a critique, ornamentalism a theory of being.” Starting from the premise that the Asiatic female is an undertheorized presence in critical race theory, Cheng’s Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019) offers a striking new theory of “yellow” womanhood. With case studies drawn from fields and traditions as diverse as new materialism, performance studies, legal theory, feminism, and Asian American studies, Ornamentalism presents a nuanced yet familiar profile of the so-called yellow woman in the Western imagination: She is at once human and object, flesh and material, rarified and base. She is also futuristic, the original cyborg, with her fusion of the sleek and the ornamental. In the 2014 sci-fi/thriller Ex Machina, for example, Kyoko (the Asian girlfriend of the programmer) turns out to be a robot. Alluding to Plato, Cheng argues that ornamentation has been gendered feminine and racialized as Asiatic since Classical antiquity, while rejection of the ornament has been a cornerstone of masculinity.
Cheng also introduces us to Beijing Memory No. 5, Li Xiaofeng’s (2009) sculpture of a woman, or a dress, made from broken and discarded pieces of ceramic ware from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912); these shards evoke a vanished imperial China and materialize their own transformation from mere thing to ornament. Li’s porcelain woman is uncanny not for its lifelikeness but for its lifelessness. As Cheng (2020: 103) comments, “like dead languages, Li’s fragments can seem to become untranslatable, atavistic, Oriental, beautiful and modern all at once.” Can they also serve as a metaphor for our relationship to Classical antiquity?
The AAACC hosted a two-part reading group on Cheng’s Ornamentalism in the spring of 2024. For our 2026 panel at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in San Francisco, CA (January 7-10), we seek to continue and broaden the conversation around how ornamentalism intersects with studies of the ancient Mediterranean world and its receptions. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Themes of cuteness, ornament, and decor in Greek and Roman literary and material culture
- Ornamentalism and the philosophical traditions of Classical antiquity
- Metamorphosis and technological advancement; automata; artificial intelligence, and/or futuristic applications of or approaches to antiquity
- Perihumanity, a term coined by Cheng for the synthetic personhood of the Asiatic female, so entangled with thingness that she seems more “body ornament” than human
- Fragments and theories of fragmentation: How can ornamentalism inform our study of fragmentary texts, histories, and remains from antiquity?
- Does ornamentalism open up new perspectives and approaches to the study of gender, race, and ethnicity in the ancient world?
- How does ornamentalism inflect materialist and new materialist approaches to the study of objects?
- “The Classics” as both disciplinary formation and global product: How are “the Classics” ornamentalized today?
Abstracts of no more than 400 words should be submitted as PDF email attachments to AAACCabstracts@gmail.com by Friday, March 7, 2025. The subject line of your email should be “SCS 2026 Abstract.” The text of your abstract should follow the guidelines available on the SCS website and should not mention the name of the author. Abstracts will be evaluated anonymously by the panel organizers. The AAACC is committed to fostering a collaborative and supportive environment for the sharing of innovative ideas; as such, we welcome submissions from students, educators, artists, and activists of all stages and disciplines. Should you have any questions, please contact Tori Lee (toriflee@bu.edu) and Melissa Mueller (mmueller@umass.edu).