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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.
"Unique and genre-busting, Pandemic Genres takes as foundational the importance of colonialism to intimacy and health, cleverly traversing a vast terrain that spans mining, state biometrics, beauty contests, American AIDS interventions, and South African AIDS denialism."—Mark Hunter, author of Race for Education: Gender, White Tone, and Schooling in South Africa
"Shows us vivdly that pandemics are not created in a vacuum but are anticipated and constructed in ways that solidify those uneven geographies of power that govern our present world system. Within this system, we are all unevenly yoked to structures that interface with us unevenly; in times of pandemics, the consequences of this unevenness are laid bare."—Kwame Edwin Otu, author of Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana
"Unavoidably interdisciplinary and unapologetically intimate, Pandemic Genres shows how creative genres offer alternate imaginaries of the HIV/AIDS pandemic while developing modes of reading public discourse to accentuate the imaginative work they enable and obstruct. These unique reflections move beyond HIV/AIDS to illuminate how to unravel the connection between genres and any pandemics."—Naminata Diabate, author of Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa
"Pandemic Genres has been a long time in the making—and is the better for it—because it emerges from Neville Hoad's experience of living with an HIV/AIDS pandemic that has never been over, especially in South Africa. Eschewing a conventional survey of the literature of AIDS, the book instead offers an original and deeply moving take on the poetics of documentary genres and the integral place of imagination and affect in political life."—Ann Cvetkovich, author of Depression: A Public Feeling
