PDF The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right by Paul B. Jaskot in Arts-Photography

Review

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. A Fascinating Medical/Cultural StudyBy RDDIn "The Afterlife of Images"; Larissa N. Heinrich ldquo;traces the development and origins of the medical rhetoric and iconography that linked Chinese identity with bodily pathology at the onset of modernityrdquo; (pg. 4). This serves to trace the origin of the Sick Man of Asia trope. Heinrich does this through a series of case studies; including an examination of the Western imagination linking China with smallpox; the paintings of Lam Qua and their use in spreading missionary goals and Western medicine; the role of photography in cementing China as a place of disease; and the discourse of creating a Chinese body based on Western medicine rather than traditional Chinese understandings of the body. Regarding historiography; Heinrich draws extensively upon the work of Shigehisa Kuriyama in the final chapter. The ldquo;afterliferdquo; of which Heinrich writes describes the impact of the images on cultural imaginings of China.Describing the linkage between China and smallpox; Heinrich writes; ldquo;Narratives of disease could be said to exist in a coaxial relationship to narratives of national identity; complicated by both the colonial imperatives that shaped relations between China and the West at this time and the highly contextual scientific functions that emerged to describe and to determine these relationshipsrdquo; (pg. 16). The images reinforced Western missionariesrsquo; beliefs in their cultural supremacy while simultaneously serving as justification for imperial activities in the context of civilizing missions to a people characterized by ldquo;a lack of modernityrdquo; (pg. 16). Examining the joint Peter Parker/Lam Qua paintings; Heinrich writes; ldquo;Unlike the smallpox images of more than half a century earlier; [these] functioned explicitly to link notions of pathology with ideas about Chinese identityrdquo; (pg. 42). Discussing the cultural ramifications of Lam Quarsquo;s paintings and Peter Parkerrsquo;s descriptions of the subjects; Heinrich writes; ldquo;If one keeps in mind that the hospital performed most of the surgeries before the introduction of ether-based anesthesia to China (by Parker) in 1847; it becomes clear that Parkerrsquo;s journals again and again reveal his fixation with; and awe of; what he perceived as a peculiarly Chinese ability to cope with extreme painrdquo; (pg. 60). This echoes other imperial observations used to justify barbaric treatment; such as Europeansrsquo; belief that Africans had a higher tolerance to pain. (A belief that Julie Livingston described in "Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic" [Durham; NC: Duke University Press; 2012]; pages 135-139. Much like the afterlife of images; Livingston describes how imperial descriptions of pain continue to shape Africansrsquo; social practices in medicine.) Finally; Heinrich describes how ldquo;Parkerrsquo;s reports repeatedly relate stories of frustrated attempts to ply his trade on obstinate Chinese patients whom he believes are more handicapped by cultural prohibitions against Western surgical procedures than by the tumors; goiters; and fractures that afflict themrdquo; (pg. 65); further linking Western medicine with a ldquo;civilizingrdquo; force. Heinrich argues that photography demonstrates ldquo;a clear transition from a more biographical or culturally descriptive mode of representing Chinese identityhellip;to a more thoroughly racialized mode indicating a primarily metonymic relationship of disease to hostrdquo; (pg. 76). Not only did the photographs further the generic link of disease to culture rather than describe individual cases; they also spread beyond the field of medicine with tourists collecting and exchanging them as exotic souvenirs. Beyond their souvenir value; Heinrich argues ldquo;that inevitably still there was another protogenre at play by the time of early medical photography in China: the eroticrdquo; (pg. 102). The posing of the models coupled with the collecting and exchange of the photographs represented a fetishization of the Chinese as exotic through medical/scientific definitions of their otherness. In the final chapter; Heinrich draws extensively upon Kuriyamarsquo;s work to examine how the Chinese adoption of Western ideas of the body shaped the national conception of that body; even in literature. Though Heinrich works with case studies; these studies do demonstrate how; in certain cases; notions of China and of disease became linked in the Western imagination.