Living Life as a Text/tile: Animating Asian Americanist Reading Practices

ABSTRACT

This is an experimental work based loosely around my stop-motion animation, “Scare Quotes.” It asks – what is it like to live life as a textile? By imagining the self as a textile in my visual practice and writing, I consider Ornamentalism as an embodied reading and creative practice. I perform constructions of Asian femininity to critique their role in the avant-garde poetry of Gertrude Stein and Susan Howe. By stitching together the work of Lisa Lowe, Anne Cheng, and Mel Chen in this performance, I envision Asian Americanist critique as poetry and as a mode of living and feeling.

KEYWORDS:

• Experimental writing
• Ornamentalism
• affect
• femininity
• avant-garde

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Susan Howe, The Midnight (New York: New Directions, 2003), 28, 93.

2. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 88.

3. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997), 7.

4. Ibid., 3, 11.

5. Josephine Nock-Hee Park, “The Orients of Gertrude Stein,” College Literature 36, no. 3 (2009): 28.

6. Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

7. Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

8. Charles Bernstein, “Disfiguring Abstraction,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 3 (2013): 486–97, https://doi.org/10.1086/670042; Maayan Dauber, “Gertrude Stein’s Passivity: War and the Limits of Modern Subjectivity,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 58, no. 2 (2016): 129–43, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26155320; Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); and Marjorie Perloff, “What’s in a Box,” William Carlos Williams Review 18, no. 2 (1992): 50–7, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24565090.

9. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 88.

10. 1935–1937 Len Lye – “Kaleidoscope” + “A Colour Box” + “Colour Flight” (Highlights Mix), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DksmbDMDUU (accessed April 24, 2023); Norman McLaren – Dots (1940), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3-vsKwQ0Cg (accessed April 24, 2023).

11. The Grand Bizarre, directed by Jodie Mack (2018).

12. Howe, The Midnight, 76.

13. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 41.

14. Stein, Tender Buttons, 3.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clara Chin

Clara Chin is a second year PhD student and stop-motion animator in the English Department at UCSB. Her research focuses on superficiality as a framework to critique racialized constructions of femininity and material/emotional excess. She is especially interested in textual and embodied performances of narcissism and self-indulgence.