UNSW Chinese Studies Seminar
Tuesday 9 July
4:00-5:30
Morven Brown Building, 2nd Fl, Room 209, High Street, Gate 8 (main
campus Kensington/Randwick), UNSW Sydney 2052
(Registration is not necessary)
This paper will explore the history of Frankenstein’s monster—in his little-known Chinese afterlife. Sketching out a quantitative genealogy of the early Chinese translation of the idea of Frankenstein (which actually preceded the translation of Mary Shelley’s famous book itself), it highlights major shifts in representations of the body over the last two centuries. Along the way, it will trace the unexpected relationship that emerges between the cultural translation of Frankenstein and the late nineteenth-century political stereotype of China as a “sleeping lion” made famous by Liang Qichao and others. The paper aims to contextualize representations of the body and its antagonists—and thus what counts as “real”—in a more biotechnologically sophisticated age.
About the Speaker
Ari Larissa Heinrich is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He received the Master’s degree in Chinese Literature from Harvard University and the PhD in Chinese Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, after which serving as Lecturer in the Department of Chinese Studies at UNSW. His research interests include science and medicine in Chinese art and literature; literary translation; speculative fiction; and global gender and sexual minority cultures. In addition to literary translations, Ari’s publications include monographs: The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body Between China and the West (Duke, 2008) and co-edited volumes: Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures (with Fran Martin, University of Hawai’i Press, 2006) and Queer Sinophone Cultures (with Howard Chiang, Routledge, 2013). His latest book, Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (Duke, 2018) explores the meaning of race and the aesthetics of the human body as commodity in the age of biotech. Ari is currently co-editing a special issue of the journal Screen Bodies on “Sinofuturisms” with Howard Chiang and Ta-wei Chi, and his translation of Chi’s seminal 1995 novel “The Membranes” (膜) is forthcoming with Columbia University Press in 2020. He has a new monograph in progress on the use of biological materials in the artwork of Hong Kong artist Jes K. Fan, tentatively titled The Social Life of Melanin in the Art of Jes K. Fan.
Discussant: Dr Johanna Hood (UNSW)
Further information: Prof Jon Eugene von Kowallis (Convenor of Chinese Studies)
j.vonkowallis@unsw.edu.au tel. 9385-1020 School of Humanities and Languages, UNSW