Chinese Surplus

In CHINESE SURPLUS Ari Heinrich dissects the figure of the medically or artistically commodified body in Chinese culture and popular science. Providing a history of how bodies have been thought and seen to mirror the nation, Heinrich charts the trajectory from an imperial idea of the body as a machine with interchangeable parts to current representations in which the parts are worth more than the whole and may be harvested at will--what he calls a diasporic form of the body. In seeing the body this way Heinrich makes clear his case for a new method he calls biopolitical aesthetics, one that…