Description
What happens when the body becomes art in the age of biotechnological reproduction? In Chinese Surplus Ari Larissa Heinrich examines transnational Chinese aesthetic production to demonstrate how representations of the medically commodified body can illuminate the effects of biopolitical violence and postcolonialism in contemporary life. From the earliest appearance of Frankenstein in China to the more recent phenomenon of "cadaver art," he shows how vivid images of a blood transfusion as performance art or a plastinated corpse without its skin-however upsetting to witness-constitute the new "realism" of our times. Adapting Foucauldian biopolitics to better account for race, Heinrich provides a means to theorize the relationship between the development of new medical technologies and the representation of the human body as a site of annexation, extraction, art, and meaning-making.
About the Author
Ari Larissa Heinrich is Professor of Chinese Literature and Media at the Australian National University . He is the author of The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures.
Reviews
"A compelling account of how the aesthetics of corporeal politics has come to condition the rhetorics and epistemologies of life, realism, existence, authenticity, technology, reproduction, and the body itself, Chinese Surplus will forever change the way we think about the power of visual embodiment in an age of increasing angst over property/propriety rights, technological determinism, and human's role in their imbricated historical legacy." -- Howard Chiang * Journal of the History of Biology *
"Chinese Surplus is an ambitious project that weaves together a transnational and transhistorical consideration of aesthetic production and biomedical commodification. . . . Heinrich's project does the groundbreaking work of connecting the global power dynamics of contemporary cultural productions engaged with fragmentation and labeled inauthentic with longer histories of imperialism." -- Kathryn Cai * Catalyst *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822370536
Author Ari Larissa Heinrich
Format Paperback
Page Count 264
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 363g
About the Author
Ari Larissa Heinrich is Professor of Chinese Literature and Media at the Australian National University . He is the author of The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures.
Reviews
"A compelling account of how the aesthetics of corporeal politics has come to condition the rhetorics and epistemologies of life, realism, existence, authenticity, technology, reproduction, and the body itself, Chinese Surplus will forever change the way we think about the power of visual embodiment in an age of increasing angst over property/propriety rights, technological determinism, and human's role in their imbricated historical legacy." -- Howard Chiang * Journal of the History of Biology *
"Chinese Surplus is an ambitious project that weaves together a transnational and transhistorical consideration of aesthetic production and biomedical commodification. . . . Heinrich's project does the groundbreaking work of connecting the global power dynamics of contemporary cultural productions engaged with fragmentation and labeled inauthentic with longer histories of imperialism." -- Kathryn Cai * Catalyst *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822370536
Author Ari Larissa Heinrich
Format Paperback
Page Count 264
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 363g
