Talk

This talk by cultural theorist, Princeton Professor of English, and historian Anne Anlin Cheng takes a collage made by the early 20th-century architect Eileen Gray (collage TR168801, MoMA, circa 1935) as a springboard from which to examine the submerged history of racialized gender in the making of modern architectural theory. Gray’s enigmatic, previously never-before-shown collage triggers a series of revelations that in turn shed light on the birth of modern architectural history, theory, and the roles that racial-gendered projections and envy played in their making.

Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English, and affiliated faculty in the Program in American Studies, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Committee on Film Studies, at Princeton. She is an interdisciplinary, comparative race scholar who focuses on the uneasy intersection between politics and aesthetics. Her scholarship draws widely from literary and visual studies, race and gender studies, film and architectural theory, legal studies, and psychoanalysis. She works primarily with twentieth-century American literature and visual culture with special focus on Asian American and African American literatures. Her first book, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (2001), examined melancholia and its role in the formation of racial identity in the United States. Among other noted recent works, she penned the incisive Op-Ed "What This Wave of Anti-Asian Violence Reveals About America" in the New York Times; released a second edition of her book Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface; and published a 2024 memoir and essay collection, named one of Hyperallergic's "30 Best Art Books of 2024", Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority.