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The Afterlife of Images - Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West (Paperback)
Loot Price: R669
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The Afterlife of Images - Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West (Paperback)
Series: Body, Commodity, Text
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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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.
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