Chinese Surplus

"In this important and complex work, Ari Larissa Heinrich continues his interrogation with the politics of the body through a systematic examination of various representations of the medically commodified body in contemporary Chinese and transnational literature, media, art, visual culture, and popular science. Incorporating both political economy and aesthetics, this examination opens up new ways to thinking about the interrelationship and interpenetration between science, medicine, commodity, and the arts in modern and contemporary environments." - Wu Hung, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

“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

“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 offers detailed and nuanced analyses of a wide range of discourses and cultural formations. . . . The greatest contribution of Chinese Surplus is that it offers a way of thinking about what it might mean to unlock ['the body as an archive'], and the Pandora’s box that it represents." - Carlos Rojas, China Information

"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

“Chinese Surplus is definitely cutting-edge research on the biopolitical aesthetics of the highly commodified form of the human body as a biomaterial in contemporary global cultural and medical markets. Its surplus value overflows from conventional literary, art, and film studies into medical humanities.”

"[Chinese Surplus] is ultimately convincing that to understand the objecti?cation and commodi?cation of 'real' human bodies in China today, we must also pay attention to the ways in which biopolitical aesthetics condition both those bodies and the representations of bodies."