Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS

Synopsis

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.

Copyright:

2025

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780520402546

Related ISBNs:

9780520402539

Publisher:

University of California Press

Date of Addition:

02/04/25

Copyrighted By:

Neville Hoad

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Nonfiction, Health, Mind and Body, Social Studies, Medicine, Politics and Government

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.