Pandemic Genres

As HIV/AIDS emerged as a public health crisis across sub-Saharan Africa, it became the subject of international interest that was at once prurient, benevolent, and interventionist. Meanwhile, the experience of living with HIV/AIDS became an object of aesthetic representation in multiple genres produced by Africans themselves. In Pandemic Genres, Neville Hoad investigates how cultural production—novels, poems, films—around the pandemic engaged 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 may forecast new possibilities.

“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

“Shows us vividly 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 world system. In times of pandemics, the consequences of this unevenness are laid bare.” — Kwame Edwin Otu, author of Amphibious Subjects

“Unavoidably interdisciplinary and unapologetically intimate, these reflections move beyond HIV/AIDS to illuminate how to unravel the connection between genres and any pandemics.” — Naminata Diabate, author of Naked Agency

“Eschewing a conventional survey of the literature of AIDS, Neville Hoad 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

Neville Hoad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the UT School of Law. He is author of African Intimacies.