This week sees the start of a major lecture series hosted by us collectively in CL. Between now and late May, six leading thinkers will visit us under the banner of “Area Impossible / Sexuality and Geopolitics.” The first talk is in the Comp Lit Seminar Room––tomorrow––February 27, from 5:30 onwards.
Speaker: ARI HEINRICH (UCSD)
Title: Chinese Bodies as Biological Surplus: Plastinated Cadavers and Geopolitical Hierarchies of the Human
Abstract: “A firestorm of human rights critiques often greets the opening of an exhibit of plastinated cadavers in Europe and North America, obscuring any attempts to critique the notion of the human (and indeed of “rights”) in the smoke from its blaze. My talk asks what a comparative examination of Chinese-language discourse on the plastinated human cadaver exhibits might reveal about the political economics of race and capital distribution that inform them.”
