Friends Annual Mary Pitcairn Keating Lecture | Strange Life: Women, Porcelain, and Other Vessels

What is the racial logic behind the history of ornament? How do the decorative arts, often seen as frivolous, become a heated site of contestation over human value?     

Distinguished author and Professor of English Anne A. Cheng will trace a centuries-long conflation in the Euro-American imagination between porcelain—one of the early global commodities of transpacific desire and exchange—and Asiatic femininity. She will discuss how this merging of “thingliness” and “woman” serves as a fulcrum from which we can begin to understand how the specter of the “yellow woman” animates the romance of pastness and fuels the designs of futurity, how this ghostly figure jeopardizes the distinction between the human and the inhuman so foundational to the dream of modernity.