Literary and Visual Representations of HIV/AIDS

Reviews / Votes

Bringing together both literature and the visual arts in the depiction of the HIV/AIDS crisis from a global perspective, Literary and Visual Representations of HIV/AIDS makes a significant contribution to our understanding and witness of this epidemic and how it impacts the lives and institutions of people around the world. The contributions to this collection are nuanced and lasting, making us empathetic to the suffering and calling for us an ethical response to it. -- Lee Trepanier, Assumption University Forty years after HIV became an epidemic, ravaging lives and communities worldwide, we are still dealing with its effects and transmission, though at greatly reduced rates. This collection helps us bear witness to the struggle to end the epidemic by focusing on the role and importance of cultural works as "artifacts of memory," as expressions of mourning and protest, and as opportunities for reducing fear and stigma. Cogent and engaging, the collection offers invaluable perspective on how cultural acts and activism helped to turn endurance and survival into viable options. -- Christopher Lane, author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness Notable for their robust range of critical perspectives across genre, media, and national boundaries, the essays in this collection move fluently between the early days of the epidemic to the present, suggesting startling continuities and fissures among representations of HIV/AIDS and their analyses. Here cultural critique supplements the best kind of close reading, at once imaginative and historically accountable, laying bare the neoliberalization of social policy as well the enduring rhetoric of blame/responsibility in all its stigmatizing force. The attention to forgotten and neglected texts especially will invigorate discussions of HIV/AIDS and the politics of representation. -- Hiram Perez, Vassar College