Literary and Visual Representations of HIV/AIDS

Literary and Visual Representations of HIV/AIDS: Forty Years Later depicts how film and literature about the HIV/AIDS crisis expand upon the issues generated by the epidemic. This collection fills an important gap in the scholarship on HIV/AIDS, by bringing together essays by both established and junior scholars on visual and literary representations of HIV/AIDS. Almost forty years after the first reported cases of what would later be defined as AIDS, this book looks back across the decades at works of literature and film to discuss how the representation of HIV/AIDS has shifted in media. This book argues that literature constitutes a very powerful response to AIDS that ripples into film and politics, driving the changes in past and contemporary representations of HIV/AIDS. The book also expands discussion of the issues generated and amplified by the epidemic to consider how HIV/AIDS has been portrayed in the United States, Western and Southern Africa, Western Europe, and East Asia.

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., 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., 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.

Christine Cynn is associate professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.Jennifer Lavoie is instructor of English and American Studies at Central Connecticut State University. Aimee Pozorski is professor of English and director of English graduate studies at Central Connecticut State University.