Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English at Princeton University with affiliations in American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Film Studies. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief; Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface, which won Honorable Mention for Best Book from the Modernist Studies Association; and, most recently, Ornamentalism (2019). Her book of personal essays, Ordinary Disasters is forthcoming from Knopf in Fall 2024.
Anne Anlin Cheng
Contributions
Judging by its Cover, Part 1
On October 26, 1936, T. S. Eliot wrote a letter to American writer and host of an influential Parisian literary salon, Natalie Barney. In it he admitted with discernible embarrassment that his most recent author at Faber & Faber, Djuna Barnes—whose Ladies Almanack (1928) was about Barney’s salon and featured her as the character Dame Evangeline Musset—did not approve of the design for the first edition of Nightwood. “I must explain,” he writes,