Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

As HIV/AIDS emerged as a public health crisis of significant proportions across sub-Saharan Africa, it became the subject of local and international interest that was at once prurient, benevolent, and interventionist. Meanwhile, the experience of Africans living with HIV/AIDS became an object of aesthetic representation in multiple genres produced by Africans themselves. These cultural representations engaged public discourse--the public policy pronouncements of officials of postcolonial states, an emerging global NGO-speak, and journalism. In Pandemic Genres, Neville Hoad investigates how cultural production--novels, poems, films--around the pandemic supplemented public discourse. He shows that the long historical imaginaries of race, empire, and sex in Botswana, Kenya, and South Africa underwrote all attempts to bring the pandemic into public representation. Attention to genres that stage themselves as imaginary, particularly on the terrain of feeling, may forecast possibilities for new figurations.

Neville Hoad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the UT School of Law. He is author of African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization.