Description
Book SynopsisAri 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.
Trade Review“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 *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction. Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Chinese Body as Surplus 1
1. Chinese Whispers: Frankenstein, the Sleeping Lion, and the Emergence of a Biopolitical Aesthetics 25
2. Souvenirs of the Organ Trade: The Diasporic Body in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Art 49
3. Organ Economics: Transplant, Class, and Witness from
Made in Hong Kong to
The Eye 83
4. Still Life: Recovering (Chinese) Ethnicity in the
Body Worlds and Beyond 115
Epilogue. All Rights Preserved: Intellectual Property and the Plastinated Cadaver Exhibits 139
Notes 159
Bibliography 227
Index 239
