Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute for Eighteenth-Century Studies

SPRING 2021 VIRTUAL SEMINAR SERIES 
Race in the Eighteenth Century

Racialized Porcelain, Animality, & Asian “White Matter” 
Chi-Ming Yang
University of Pennsylvania 

This talk will elaborate on the multiple registers of chinoiserie at work in an ostentatious, even monstrous, pair of eighteenth-century Sèvres “elephant head” porcelain vases currently housed at the Walters Museum in Baltimore. How do such luxury objects draw from early modern natural history, the Allegories of Four Continents, and the “white matter” of Asian material culture to create a multi-sensory experience of wonder or revulsion?Decorative objects have much to tell us about the history of East-West exchanges as they shaped the emergence of racial thinking and the ongoing legacies of racial ornament today. 

Registration Required: go.lehigh.edu/chimingyang