Anne Anlin Cheng is Professor of English and the Associate Chair in the Department of English and a core faculty in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. She specializes in race studies and psychoanalytic theory and works in twentieth-century American literature, with special focus on Asian American and African American literatures. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Assimilation, Psychoanalysis, and Hidden Grief (Oxford University Press), which explores the notion of racial grief at the intersection of culture, history, and law. She is currently completing a manuscript on Josephine Baker and the intimate relationship between the theatricalization of racialized skin in the early twentieth century and the Modernist ideal of the denuded surface.