Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS

Author/Contributor(s):	Hoad, Neville Wallace
Publisher:	University of California Press
Date:	02/04/2025
Binding:	Paperback
Condition:	NEW

"As HIV/AIDS emerged as a public health crisis of significant proportions across much of sub-Saharan Africa, it became the subject of local and international interest--prurient, benevolent, and interventionist. Meanwhile, the experience of Africans living with HIV/AIDS became an object of aesthetic representation in multiple genres 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. From Botswana, Kenya, and South Africa, he shows that the long historical imaginaries of race, empire, and sex 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"--