| The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body Between China and the West Contributor(s): Heinrich, Ari Larissa (Author) |
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ISBN: 0822340933 ISBN-13: 9780822340935 Publisher: Duke University Press OUR PRICE: $97.80 Product Type: Hardcover Published: February 2008 Annotation: ""The Afterlife of Images" is a fascinating and important study of the ways that Western medicine participated in the formation of ideas of race, the discrete body, the autonomous self, the nation, and a modernist literary imagination in China. Well written, carefully researched, and loaded with subtle and persuasive interpretations, it is the kind of historical study needed to demonstrate the aesthetic and ontological constructions--the naturalizing powers of medical representation--that have given us our complex modern 'nature.'"--Judith Farquhar, author of "Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China" |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Medical | History - History | Asia - China - Art | History - General |
| Dewey: 610.951 |
| LCCN: 2007032555 |
| Series: Body, Commodity, Text: Studies of Objectifying Practice |
| Physical Information: 248 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Chinese |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |