Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780520402539)

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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.


Author: Neville Wallace Hoad
ISBN-10: 0520402537
ISBN-13: 9780520402539
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 02/04/2025
Pages: 264
Format: Paperback