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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
Show panel list
"Today AIDS laughs": HIV narratives and the citizenship of disease
| Panel |
88. Cultural construction of the nation: which way Africa?
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| Paper ID | 727 |
| Author(s) |
Birch, Alannah Elizabeth Mary; Jungar, Katarina
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | South African literature on HIV/AIDS has grown rapidly over the past five years. This includes novels, short stories, poems, cartoons, autobiographies and biographies. Many of these texts deal with HIV/AIDS politics, directly or indirectly, showing the lived realities of the disease, but also reflecting on the policy responses to it. HIV narratives are interesting because they often speak directly and openly about a "disaster" which, in the Western imagination, confirms the image of Africa as the "dark continent"; a place of unknown and indescribable horrors. On the other hand so-called AIDS 'denialism' can be read in part as an attempt to resist Western constructions of Africa and therefore as part of a project to build a national agenda.
However, HIV-AIDS narratives, which make the horrors of the disease "known", speakable and spoken of, could be seen to challenge both the established 'dark-continent' discourse as well as 'denialist' views from the government. Our paper will consider the way in which some of these HIV narratives interrogate the dichotomies of the nationalist project. Furthermore, in representing a communal struggle around the disease, these narratives might be seen to develop a different sort of "nationbuilding" discourse. |
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