TODAY. From 2:30-4:30 pm in Rome Hall #771, Prof. Chi-ming Yang (Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania) will present “Asia in the Making of the New World.” Prof. Yang is the author of Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660-1760(Johns Hopkins UP, 2011). Her talk is co-sponsored by the GW English Department, the East Asian Languages and Literatures Department, and MEMSI. Abstract How did the Asian luxury trade shape new representations of race in Europe and the Americas? By the mid-1600s, the demand for Chinese and Japanese luxury goods was shaping Western tastes across the Atlantic world, and the drive to replicate these commodities spurred numerous innovations in the arts and sciences, in particular, techniques for coloring and coating surfaces. The marvelous, glossy veneers of China trade porcelain and lacquer also provided new media for portraying indigenous peoples of the Americas. Fantastical chinoiserie designs often juxtaposed ethnographic details from travel accounts ranging from Florida to Brazil, rendering consumable the very idea of the global and aestheticizing the violence endemic to long-distance trade. How were bodies racialized through their association with Eastern luxury goods? How did Asian decorative art and ornament feed emerging discourses of slavery, complexion, and racial difference? By tracking the circulation of images of native peoples, plants, and animals between and across different media, we can better understand how an eighteenth-century aesthetics of race relied upon new technologies of representing and understanding a globalized world.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 11:57:45 +0000
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