Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)

Product 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.

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 Published On: 2018-04-01

”
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 Published On: 2019-12-10

Review

“
Chinese Surplus is a timely, deeply moving, and consequential work, one that is both intellectually and affectively engaging. It significantly advances contemporary debates about the international division of humanity, affective and immaterial labor, biopolitics and biopower, imperial legacies, and globalization. A model of interdisciplinary scholarship, its ambitious originality will become a yardstick against which future studies will be measured.”
— Lisa Lowe, author of ―
The Intimacies of Four Continents

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.