The Graduate Students of the English Department and The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA) Present: Ornamentalism, aesthetic being Thursday, April 23, 2015 5:30 pm Brown/RISD Hillel Winnick Chapel 80 Brown Street, 2nd Floor How does retrieving the ornamental logic of Orientalism impact how we think about race, personhood, and modernism? In her talk, Professor Anne Cheng will explore the meeting of violence and beauty and ask what kind of life subsists as broken or superfluous things. Through a series of readings of literary, legal, and visual texts, her talk will isolate instances of dark, miraculous moments when ornaments become flesh. Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English and of the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University and incoming Director for the Program in American Studies. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Assimilation, Psychoanalysis, and Hidden Grief (Oxford University Press) and Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University). Recent articles include: “Sushi, Otters, Mermaids: Race at the Intersection of Food and Animal,” forthcoming from Resilience: Journal in the Environmental Humanities ; “Modernism,” in A Companion to Asian American Literature and Culture; “Sheen: On Glamour, Race, and the Modern,” PMLA, among others. Reception to follow English Department Lounge 70 Brown Street Sponsored by the Department of English and the Zucker Family Fund ✥ The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America (CSREA). Co-sponsored by ✥ Department of Africana Studies ✥ Department of American Studies ✥ Department of Comparative Literature ✥ Department of French Studies ✥ Department of German Studies ✥ Department of Modern Culture & Media and the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Media and Culture ✥ Cogut Center for the Humanities ✥ Sarah Doyle Women’s Center ✥ Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. www.brown.edu/academics/english/events Anne Anlin Cheng Princeton University