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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Heinrich, Larissa N. The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008.
Main Argument:This is a breathtakingly multidisciplinary, beautifully written, quietly brilliant book. Heinrich's attempt to understand how the Euro-American stereotype of China as "the sick man of Asia" solidified in the 19th and early 20thC leads her to explicate the "development and origins of the medical rhetoric and iconography that linked Chinese identity with bodily pathology at the onset of modernity" (4) through the fields of history, the history of medicine, and the history of art. Also awesome: it has full-color plates.
Historiographical Engagement: Ruth Rogaski, Hygenic Modernity; Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples In order to understand the process by which discourse are translated between cultures, it is necessary to consider images and context alongside text; the history of the "sick man of Asia" stereotype "also exposes the extrascientific means by which some powerful stereotypes and ideas came to fuse Chinese identity with the deceptively empirical notion of pathology in the construction of modernity" (4). This process of translation also relied on a "missionary fixation on the ocular" which was crucially rooted in a priori notions of how Chinese people saw (5; emphasis in original).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples "Conceptualizations of health and hygieine in this formative period [i.e. prior to the 19thC] thus became thoroughly imbricated with conceptualizations of modernity and vice versa, so that the presence of disease in China--cholera, plague, smallpox--was interpreted both as corresponding to and evidence of a lack of modernity. The legacy of this same discourse can be found in many narratives about SARS and its origins today" (16; emphasis in original). These conceptions in turn were founded on primarily Jesuit narratives about smallpox and the inoculation thereof, which were themselves imbricated in discourses and politics about the same in the French court towards the end of the ancIén regime (I know, right?), the filigree of which discussions (and images of the same) were not preserved as they moved into wider realms. "Nineteenth and twentieth-century historians of smallpox in Chin neglected to account for the ideological power of narrative in the construction of notions of disease and transmission, resulting in a complex legacy of stereotypes and misunderstandings about China in the present day. We need not make the same mistake" (37; emphasis mine).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples In the aftermath of the Opium Wars Protestant missionaries such as the doctor Peter Parker faced two competing objectives: first, to prove themselves and their learning and by extent their religion superior to Chinese forms of knowledge, and second, to obtain funds from potential supporters back home by testimonies of their efficacy. Parker hit on a particularly effective way to do this through his collaboration with the Chinese Western-style painter Lam Qua and his Canton studio; between them, the doctor and the painter produced a discourse of Chinese pathology and characteristics (and characteristic pathology) that had extraordinary influence on the evolution of discourses of disease, race, and modernity both in and outside of China in the years after their partnership's end.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples "In photography of this period [the second half of the 19thC, particularly by Western doctors], I will argue, we can see a clear transition from a more biographical or culturally descriptive mode of representing Chinese identity (a "culturally characteristic" and metaphoric pathology closer in spirit to that represented in Lam Qua's paintings) to a more thoroughly racialized mode indicating a primarily metonymic relationship of disease to host (the "Chinese specimen," now representing the Chinese empire as well)" (76).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples "…the functional system of traditional Chinese anatomical practice is so divergent from Western counterparts as to be virtually untranslatable, or translatable only with a great caveat: that the translated terms used to describe Chinese 'organs' and corporeal phenomena 'be understood as definitions of effective relations or functions, not simply as expressions of crude anatomical insights'" (115); "the inherently 'realist' conceptual vocabulary of Western-style dissection-based anatomy offered a solution to what Chinese writers and Western-trained doctors alike perceived as a troubling lack in Chinese descriptive traditions that failed to account for the (material, and eventually 'modern') body with its layers of muscle and manifold definitions of flesh" (116). This discourse had an incalculable impact on the development of modern Chinese literature, to say nothing of the modern conception of Chinese medicine.
Critical assessment: This is such a beautifully written, easy to understand, excellent book; I think Heinrich's unwillingness to be bounded by the parochial limits of disciplines is a huge factor in the strength and success of her arguments. She actually came to talk to us in class, and she was quite kind and unassumingly awesome; she mentioned at one point that the book evolved out of a longer dissertation that was a consideration of the discourse of sickness in the works of Lu Xun, the titanic literary figure in Republican China. In some ways it makes sense to imagine this book as the first half of a longer work, though the ending doesn't really feel abrupt. Heinrich also makes clear through implication how easily the supposedly rational and objective discourses of science and medicine are repurposed and deployed for tendentious, politicized, even imperialistic purposes; in some ways the imposition of modern science and medicine on China, more or less with the threat of military force implicit in its background, mirrors the imposition at gunpoint of the supposedly universal and transcendent of international law discussed by James Hevia and Lydia Liu: chilling. If the topic sounds at all interesting to you, I can't recommend this book enough. (I should note, however, that the images in the book are probably not for the medically squeamish.)
Further reading: Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography; Judith Farquhar, Appetites; John Hay, "The Body invisible in Chinese Art?"; Thomas Lamarre, "Bacterial Cultures and Linguistic Colonies"; Ruth Rogaski, Hygenic Modernity; Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice
Meta notes: If something catches your attention, write it down: you'll never know when it will be crucial.
Realistic genres do not mirror everyday life; they mirror its hierarchicization of information. They are mimetic of values, not of the material world.
--Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic,
the Souvenir, the Collection
Main Argument:This is a breathtakingly multidisciplinary, beautifully written, quietly brilliant book. Heinrich's attempt to understand how the Euro-American stereotype of China as "the sick man of Asia" solidified in the 19th and early 20thC leads her to explicate the "development and origins of the medical rhetoric and iconography that linked Chinese identity with bodily pathology at the onset of modernity" (4) through the fields of history, the history of medicine, and the history of art. Also awesome: it has full-color plates.
Historiographical Engagement: Ruth Rogaski, Hygenic Modernity; Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples In order to understand the process by which discourse are translated between cultures, it is necessary to consider images and context alongside text; the history of the "sick man of Asia" stereotype "also exposes the extrascientific means by which some powerful stereotypes and ideas came to fuse Chinese identity with the deceptively empirical notion of pathology in the construction of modernity" (4). This process of translation also relied on a "missionary fixation on the ocular" which was crucially rooted in a priori notions of how Chinese people saw (5; emphasis in original).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples "Conceptualizations of health and hygieine in this formative period [i.e. prior to the 19thC] thus became thoroughly imbricated with conceptualizations of modernity and vice versa, so that the presence of disease in China--cholera, plague, smallpox--was interpreted both as corresponding to and evidence of a lack of modernity. The legacy of this same discourse can be found in many narratives about SARS and its origins today" (16; emphasis in original). These conceptions in turn were founded on primarily Jesuit narratives about smallpox and the inoculation thereof, which were themselves imbricated in discourses and politics about the same in the French court towards the end of the ancIén regime (I know, right?), the filigree of which discussions (and images of the same) were not preserved as they moved into wider realms. "Nineteenth and twentieth-century historians of smallpox in Chin neglected to account for the ideological power of narrative in the construction of notions of disease and transmission, resulting in a complex legacy of stereotypes and misunderstandings about China in the present day. We need not make the same mistake" (37; emphasis mine).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples In the aftermath of the Opium Wars Protestant missionaries such as the doctor Peter Parker faced two competing objectives: first, to prove themselves and their learning and by extent their religion superior to Chinese forms of knowledge, and second, to obtain funds from potential supporters back home by testimonies of their efficacy. Parker hit on a particularly effective way to do this through his collaboration with the Chinese Western-style painter Lam Qua and his Canton studio; between them, the doctor and the painter produced a discourse of Chinese pathology and characteristics (and characteristic pathology) that had extraordinary influence on the evolution of discourses of disease, race, and modernity both in and outside of China in the years after their partnership's end.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples "In photography of this period [the second half of the 19thC, particularly by Western doctors], I will argue, we can see a clear transition from a more biographical or culturally descriptive mode of representing Chinese identity (a "culturally characteristic" and metaphoric pathology closer in spirit to that represented in Lam Qua's paintings) to a more thoroughly racialized mode indicating a primarily metonymic relationship of disease to host (the "Chinese specimen," now representing the Chinese empire as well)" (76).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples "…the functional system of traditional Chinese anatomical practice is so divergent from Western counterparts as to be virtually untranslatable, or translatable only with a great caveat: that the translated terms used to describe Chinese 'organs' and corporeal phenomena 'be understood as definitions of effective relations or functions, not simply as expressions of crude anatomical insights'" (115); "the inherently 'realist' conceptual vocabulary of Western-style dissection-based anatomy offered a solution to what Chinese writers and Western-trained doctors alike perceived as a troubling lack in Chinese descriptive traditions that failed to account for the (material, and eventually 'modern') body with its layers of muscle and manifold definitions of flesh" (116). This discourse had an incalculable impact on the development of modern Chinese literature, to say nothing of the modern conception of Chinese medicine.
Critical assessment: This is such a beautifully written, easy to understand, excellent book; I think Heinrich's unwillingness to be bounded by the parochial limits of disciplines is a huge factor in the strength and success of her arguments. She actually came to talk to us in class, and she was quite kind and unassumingly awesome; she mentioned at one point that the book evolved out of a longer dissertation that was a consideration of the discourse of sickness in the works of Lu Xun, the titanic literary figure in Republican China. In some ways it makes sense to imagine this book as the first half of a longer work, though the ending doesn't really feel abrupt. Heinrich also makes clear through implication how easily the supposedly rational and objective discourses of science and medicine are repurposed and deployed for tendentious, politicized, even imperialistic purposes; in some ways the imposition of modern science and medicine on China, more or less with the threat of military force implicit in its background, mirrors the imposition at gunpoint of the supposedly universal and transcendent of international law discussed by James Hevia and Lydia Liu: chilling. If the topic sounds at all interesting to you, I can't recommend this book enough. (I should note, however, that the images in the book are probably not for the medically squeamish.)
Further reading: Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography; Judith Farquhar, Appetites; John Hay, "The Body invisible in Chinese Art?"; Thomas Lamarre, "Bacterial Cultures and Linguistic Colonies"; Ruth Rogaski, Hygenic Modernity; Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice
Meta notes: If something catches your attention, write it down: you'll never know when it will be crucial.