Ari Larissa Heinrich

Ari Larissa Heinrich examines transnational Chinese aesthetic production--from the earliest appearance of Frankenstein in China to the more recent phenomenon of "cadaver art"-- to demonstrate how representations of the medically commodified body can illuminate the effects of biopolitical violence and postcolonialism in contemporary life.

Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body

Chinese Surplus

Howard Chiang

The Sinophone framework emphasises the diversity of Chinese-speaking communities and cultures, and seeks to move beyond a binary model of China and the West. Indeed, this strikingly resembles attempts within the queer studies movement to challenge the dimorphisms of sex and gender. Bringing together two areas of study that tend to be marginalised within their home disciplines Queer Sinophone Cultures innovatively advances both Sinophone studies and queer studies. It not only examines film and literature from Mainland China but expands its scope to encompass the underrepresented ‘Sinophone’ world at large (in this case Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and beyond). Further, where queer studies in the U.S., Europe, and Australia often ignore non-Western cultural phenomena, this book focuses squarely on Sinophone queerness, providing fresh critical analyses of a range of topics from works by the famous director Tsai Ming-Liang to the history of same-sex soft-core pornography made by the renowned Shaw Brothers Studios. By instigating a dialogue between Sinophone studies and queer studies, this book will have broad appeal to students and scholars of modern and contemporary China studies, particularly to those interested in film, literature, media, and performance. It will also be of great interest to those interested in queer studies more broadly.

Queer Sinophone Cultures

In 1739 China’s emperor authorized the publication of a medical text that included images of children with smallpox to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Those images made their way to Europe, where they were interpreted as indicative of the ill health and medical backwardness of the Chinese. In the mid-nineteenth century, the celebrated Cantonese painter Lam Qua collaborated with the American medical missionary Peter Parker in the creation of portraits of Chinese patients with disfiguring pathologies, rendered both before and after surgery. Europeans saw those portraits as evidence of Western medical prowess. Within China, the visual idiom that the paintings established influenced the development of medical photography. In The Afterlife of Images, Ari Larissa Heinrich investigates the creation and circulation of Western medical discourses that linked ideas about disease to Chinese identity beginning in the eighteenth century. Combining literary studies, the history of science, and visual culture studies, Heinrich analyzes the rhetoric and iconography through which medical missionaries transmitted to the West an image of China as “sick” or “diseased.” He also examines the absorption of that image back into China through missionary activity, through the earliest translations of Western medical texts into Chinese, and even through the literature of Chinese nationalism. Heinrich argues that over time “scientific” Western representations of the Chinese body and culture accumulated a host of secondary meanings, taking on an afterlife with lasting consequences for conceptions of Chinese identity in China and beyond its borders.

Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West

The Afterlife of Images

Fran Martin

From feminist philosophy to genetic science, scholarship in recent years has succeeded in challenging many entrenched assumptions about the material and biological status of human bodies. Likewise in the study of Chinese cultures, accelerating globalization and the resultant hybridity have called into question previous assumptions about the boundaries of Chinese national and ethnic identity. The problem of identifying a single or definitive referent for the "Chinese body" is thornier than ever. By facilitating fresh dialogue between fields as diverse as the history of science, literary studies, diaspora studies, cultural anthropology, and contemporary Chinese film and cultural studies, Embodied Modernities addresses contemporary Chinese embodiments as they are represented textually and as part of everyday life practices. The book is divided into two sections, each with a dedicated introduction by the editors. The first examines "Thresholds of Modernity" in chapters on Chinese body cultures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period of intensive cultural, political, and social modernization that led to a series of radical transformations in how bodies were understood and represented.The second section on "Contemporary Embodiments" explores body representations across the People’s Republic of China,Taiwan, and Hong Kong today. Contributors: Chris Berry, Louise Edwards, Maram Epstein, Larissa Heinrich, Olivia Khoo, Fran Martin, Jami Proctor-Xu, Tze-lan D. Sang, Teri Silvio, Mark Stevenson, Cuncun Wu, Angela Zito, John Zou.

Ari Larissa Heinrich

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