Anne Anlin Cheng

Last updated
Anne Anlin Cheng
Alma materPrinceton University (BA)

Stanford University (MA)

UC Berkeley (Ph. D)
Occupation(s)Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University

Anne Anlin Cheng is an American literary scholar and cultural theorist, known for her extensive writings on the intersections of race, gender, aesthetics, American literature, psychoanalysis, Asian American studies, and Black studies. She is currently a Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Cheng was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and immigrated to the United States at the age of twelve. Cheng graduated with a Bachelor's degree in English and Creative Writing from Princeton University in 1985, earned her Master's in English and Creative Writing at Stanford University in 1987, and received a PhD in Comparative Literature at University California, Berkeley in 1994.

Research and publications

Cheng's first book, The Melancholy of Race (2001), examined melancholia as the very process that forms racial identity the United States. The book weaves a thread between historic moments in the nation's legal system such as the Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court case, literature such as Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior , film such as Flower Drum Song, and conceptual artists such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. [2]

Her research often returns to 20th century figures such as Anna May Wong and Josephine Baker. Rather than characterize these highly visible "race beauties" as simply empowering or stereotypical, Cheng asks readers to consider them as "severely compromised" and highly fabricated, aestheticized surfaces that trouble our sense of the human. [3] Benjamin Kahan, Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University, wrote of her second book Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface, "it might be easy to miss that this is a monumental work of scholarship, making major interventions into critical race theory and modernist studies." [4]

Her most recent book, Ornamentalism (2019), aims to formulate the first "feminist theory for the yellow woman." By centering her critique on the myth of the "yellow" woman rather than more politically correct, ameliorative terms such as Asian-American, Cheng hoped to address the painful and unspoken ways in which Asiatic femininity is constructed rather than necessarily claimed. [5] In a review of the book, scholar Michelle Lee writes, "building on writers such as Mel Chen and Fred Moten, Cheng’s logic of ornamentalism suggests that objectification is no longer the threatening process which removes subjecthood, but rather prioritizes how objects become animated, highlighting how performances of liberation emerge from inorganic, inanimate places." [6] In an interview with Shivani Radhakrishnan for BOMB Magazine, Cheng says, "I think there is obviously a very well-developed critique of the ways in which Western modernists have appropriated racial otherness in their aesthetics. And they’re right. Except, oftentimes the way that critique is offered ends up reproducing a sort of subject-object divide, so that the Western is a subject of intellectual intent who then takes advantage of the racial other who is an object and ready to be used in this way." [7]

Taken together, Cheng's works build upon race theorists such as Saidiya Hartman, Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, and Hortense Spillers to place Asian-American studies firmly within the discussion surrounding racial formation in the United States, as seen in her previous books such as The Melancholy of Race (2001) and critical reviews for the Los Angeles Review of Books that have covered Ghost in the Shell , [8] Crazy Rich Asians , [9] Minari , [10] and Mulan . [11] Other essays of hers can be found in The Atlantic, [12] The Nation, [13] Hyperallergic, [14] and Huffington Post. [15]

Political activism

Comments on Stop Asian Hate

Anne Anlin Cheng was vocal during the 2021 Atlanta Spa Shootings, which targeted Asian women and was motivated by sexual desire. For The New York Times, she penned an op-ed that particularly pushed back on popular assumptions that Asian Americans experienced injuries that were too privileged to warrant serious attention, writing, "There is something wrong with the way Americans think about who deserves social justice — as though attention to nonwhite groups, their histories and conditions, is only as pressing as the injuries that they have suffered." [16] For CBS news, she expanded on this, emphasizing that “Mild forms of racist, sexist harassment is on a continuum of what we saw in Atlanta last week, a very lethal expression of that.” [17]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan</span> President of India from 1962 to 1967

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was an Indian politician, philosopher and statesman who served as the second president of India from 1962 to 1967. He previously served as the first vice president of India from 1952 to 1962. He was the second ambassador of India to the Soviet Union from 1949 to 1952. He was also the fourth vice-chancellor of Banaras Hindu University from 1939 to 1948 and the second vice-chancellor of Andhra University from 1931 to 1936. Radhakrishnan is considered one of the most influential and distinguished 20th century scholars of comparative religion and philosophy, he held the King George V Chair of Mental and Moral Science at the University of Calcutta from 1921 to 1932 and Spalding Chair of Eastern Religion and Ethics at University of Oxford from 1936 to 1952.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asian Americans</span> Americans of Asian ancestry

Asian Americans are Americans of Asian ancestry. Although this term had historically been used for all the indigenous peoples of the continent of Asia, the usage of the term "Asian" by the United States Census Bureau only includes people with origins or ancestry from East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent and excludes people with ethnic origins in certain parts of Asia, including West Asia who are now categorized as Middle Eastern Americans. Furthermore, Central Asians are not mentioned in any census racial category. The "Asian" census category includes people who indicate their race(s) on the census as "Asian" or reported entries such as "Chinese, Indian, Bangladeshi, Filipino, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Korean, Japanese, Pakistani, Malaysian, and Other Asian". In 2020, Americans who identified as Asian alone (19,886,049) or in combination with other races (4,114,949) made up 7.2% of the U.S. population.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wendy Doniger</span> American Indologist (born 1940)

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty is an American Indologist whose professional career has spanned five decades. A scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions, her major works include The Hindus: An Alternative History; Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva; Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; and The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit. She is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and has taught there since 1978. She served as president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1998.

Hazel Vivian Carby is Professor Emerita of African American Studies and of American Studies. She served as Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University.

Critical race theory (CRT) is an interdisciplinary academic field focused on the relationships between social conceptions of race and ethnicity, social and political laws, and media. CRT also considers racism to be systemic in various laws and rules, and not based only on individuals' prejudices. The word critical in the name is an academic reference to critical theory rather than criticizing or blaming individuals.

Racism has been reflected in discriminatory laws, practices, and actions against "racial" or ethnic groups, throughout the history of the United States. Since the early colonial era, White Americans have generally enjoyed legally or socially sanctioned privileges and rights, which have been denied to members of various ethnic or minority groups at various times. European Americans have enjoyed advantages in matters of citizenship, criminal procedure, education, immigration, land acquisition, and voting rights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claudia Rankine</span> American poet, essayist, and playwright (born 1963)

Claudia Rankine is an American poet, essayist, playwright and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays.

Americanese is a 2006 American romantic drama film directed by Eric Byler and starring Chris Tashima, Allison Sie, Kelly Hu, Ben Shenkman, Autumn Reeser, and Joan Chen. It is based on the novel American Knees by Shawn Wong, concerning the relationships of a man and woman of East Asian descent in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kimberlé Crenshaw</span> American academic and lawyer (born 1959)

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a leading scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues.

Christopher J. Lane is a British-American medical writer, researcher and intellectual historian who taught medical humanities and the history of medicine at Northwestern University until his retirement in 2022. A former Guggenheim fellow, awarded the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing, he has held Northwestern's Pearce Miller Research Professorship and is a member of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities in the Feinberg School of Medicine. Previously, he taught at Emory University, where he was director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program in the Psychiatry Department. A Victorianist by training, Lane specializes in 19th- and 20th-century psychology, psychiatry, and intellectual history. He is a regular contributor to Psychology Today and comparable media.

Johanna Went is an American performance artist who primarily works in the Los Angeles area.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Negrophilia</span> Fetishization of Black culture

The word negrophilia is derived from the French négrophilie that means "love of the Negro". It was a term that avant-garde artists used among themselves to describe their fetishization of Black culture. Its origins were concurrent with art movements such as surrealism and Dadaism in the late 19th century. Sources of inspiration were inanimate African art objects such as masks and wooden carvings that found their way into Paris's flea markets and galleries alike as a result of colonial looting of Africa, and which inspired artworks such as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, as well as live performances by Black people, many of whom were ex-soldiers remaining in European cities after World War I, who entertained as a source of low income. Equally of interest to avant-garde creators were live arts such as dance, music and theatrical performances by Black artists, as evidenced by the popularity of comic artist Chocolat and the musical review Les Heureux Nègres (1902).

Matthew Pratt Guterl is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies at Brown University. Before his arrival at Brown University, Guterl was the James Rudy Professor of American Studies and History at Indiana University and chair of the department of American Studies. He is the author of five books and the co-author of another, and has written for The Guardian, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Inside Higher Education. Guterl appeared in the documentary Race: the Power of an Illusion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ann Laura Stoler</span> American anthropologist

Ann Laura Stoler is the Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research in New York City. She has made significant contributions to the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies, historical anthropology, feminist theory, and affect. She is particularly known for her writings on race and sexuality in the works of French philosopher Michel Foucault.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruha Benjamin</span> American sociologist

Ruha Benjamin is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. The primary focus of her work is the relationship between innovation and equity, particularly focusing on the intersection of race, justice and technology. Benjamin is the author of numerous publications, including the books People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013), Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019) and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tomashi Jackson</span> American artist

Tomashi Jackson is an American multimedia artist working across painting, video, textiles and sculpture. Jackson was born in Houston, Texas, raised in Los Angeles, and currently lives and works in New York, NY and Cambridge, MA. Jackson was named a 2019 Whitney Biennial participating artist. Jackson also serves on the faculty for sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design. Her work is included in the collection of MOCA Los Angeles. In 2004, a 20-foot-high by 80-foot-long mural by Jackson entitled Evolution of a Community was unveiled in the Los Angeles neighborhood of West Adams.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Priyamvada Gopal</span> Professor at the University of Cambridge (born 1968)

Priyamvada Gopal is an Indian-born academic, writer and public intellectual who is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her primary teaching and research interests are in colonial and postcolonial studies, South Asian literature, critical race studies, and the politics and cultures of empire and globalisation. She has written three books engaging these subjects: Literary Radicalism in India (2005), The Indian English Novel (2009) and Insurgent Empire (2019). Her third book, Insurgent Empire, was shortlisted for the 2020 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.

Subramanian Karthick Ramakrishnan, typically published as S. Karthick Ramakrishnan or Karthick Ramakrishnan, is an American political scientist, currently a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside. He is also a founder of AAPI Data and the UC Riverside Center for Social Innovation, and has been the Associate Dean of the School of Public Policy. He studies the political behavior and engagement of immigrants to the United States, and manages projects to gather data about minority groups in America.

Nyasha Junior is an American biblical scholar. Her research focuses on the connections between religion, race, and gender within the Hebrew Bible. She holds a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary. She was associate professor at Temple University before moving to the University of Toronto in the department for the Study of Religion. She was a visiting associate professor and research associate at Harvard Divinity School for the 2020–21 academic year.

<i>Minor Feelings</i> 2020 autobiographical book by Cathy Park Hong

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning is a 2020 autobiographical book of essays written by the Korean American author Cathy Park Hong. It was published by Penguin Random House in the United States and Profile Books in the United Kingdom and is composed of seven essays about growing up as an Asian-American in a Western capitalist society, more specifically in the United States of America. This book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography in 2020.

References

  1. ↑ "Anne A. Cheng". Department of English at Princeton. October 20, 2020.
  2. ↑ Lee, Anthony (Spring 2002). "Review: The Meanings of Melancholy". Art Journal. 61: 97–99. doi:10.2307/778172. JSTOR   778172.
  3. ↑ Cheng, Anne and Tom Holert (July 2, 2015). "Do You See It? Well, It Doesn't See You!". E-Flux, Politics of Shine.
  4. ↑ Kahan, Benjamin (Summer 2013). "The paradox of the Striptease". Criticism. 55 (3): 515–520. doi:10.1353/crt.2013.0024 – via GALE.
  5. ↑ Xiang, Sunny (March 18, 2019). "The Peculiar Objecthood of the "Yellow Woman"". Los Angeles Review of Books.
  6. ↑ Michelle Lee (2020): "Ornamentalism", Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, DOI: 10.1080/0740770X.2020.1791392
  7. ↑ Radhakrishnan, Shivani (Jun 30, 2021). "Anne Anlin Cheng by Shivani Radhakrishnan". BOMB Magazine.
  8. ↑ Cheng, Anne (April 17, 2017). "The Ghost in the Ghost". Los Angeles Review of Books.
  9. ↑ Cheng, Anne (August 24, 2018). "Anxious Pedigree: From Fresh-Off-The-Boat to "Crazy Rich Asians"". Los Angeles Review of Books.
  10. ↑ Cheng, Anne Anlin (February 19, 2021). "The Double Meaning of the American Dream". The Atlantic.
  11. ↑ Cheng, Anne (October 3, 2020). "I'd Rather Be a Witch Than a Warrior". Los Angeles Review of Books.
  12. ↑ Cheng, Anne (March 23, 2021). "The Dehumanizing Logic of All the 'Happy Ending' Jokes". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 2021-03-23.
  13. ↑ Cheng, Anne (October 21, 2020). "A Dilemma of Intimacy". The Nation. Archived from the original on 2020-10-22.
  14. ↑ Cheng, Anne (January 28, 2021). "How Fashion Can Relieve Us From the Burden of Visibility". Hyperallergic. Archived from the original on 2021-01-28.
  15. ↑ Cheng, Anne (March 16, 2016). "American Racial Grief, a Reprisal". Huffington Post. Archived from the original on 2020-10-26.
  16. ↑ Cheng, Anne (February 21, 2021). "What This Wave of Anti-Asian Violence Reveals About America". The New York Times. Retrieved August 31, 2021.
  17. ↑ "Growing support for Asian Americans after recent attacks". YouTube . Archived from the original on 2021-03-25.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.