Impossible Mourning

HIV/AIDS and Visuality After Apartheid

Kylie Thomas

Impossible Mourning argues that while the HIV/AIDS epidemic has figured largely in public discourse in South Africa over the last ten years, particularly in debates about governance and constitutional rights post-apartheid, the experiences of people living with HIV for the most part remain invisible and the multiple losses due to AIDS have gone publicly unmourned. This profound fact is at the center of this book which explores the significance of the disavowal of AIDS-death in relation to violence, death, and mourning under apartheid. Impossible Mourning shows how in spite of the magnitude of the epidemic and as a result of the stigma and discrimination that has largely characterized both national and personal responses to the epidemic, spaces for the expression of collective mourning have been few.
This book engages with multiple forms of visual representation that work variously to compound, undo, and complicate the politics of loss. Drawing on work Thomas did in art and narrative support groups while working with people living with HIV/AIDS in Khayelitsha, a township outside of the city of Cape Town this book also includes analyses of the work of South African visual artists and photographers Jane Alexander, Gille de Vlieg, Jillian Edelstein, Pieter Hugo, Ezrom Legae, Gideon Mendel, Zanele Muholi, Sam Nhlengethwa, Paul Stopforth, and Diane Victor.

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 156 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-61148-534-9 • Hardback • October 2013 • $105.00 • (£81.00)

978-1-61148-535-6 • eBook • October 2013 • $99.50 • (£77.00)

Subjects: Art / Art & Politics, Art / African, History / Africa / South / General, Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural, Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, Social Science / Sociology / Urban, Political Science / World / African

Impossible Mourning

HIV/AIDS and Visuality After Apartheid

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Impossible Mourning argues that while the HIV/AIDS epidemic has figured largely in public discourse in South Africa over the last ten years, particularly in debates about governance and constitutional rights post-apartheid, the experiences of people living with HIV for the most part remain invisible and the multiple losses due to AIDS have gone publicly unmourned. This profound fact is at the center of this book which explores the significance of the disavowal of AIDS-death in relation to violence, death, and mourning under apartheid. Impossible Mourning shows how in spite of the magnitude of the epidemic and as a result of the stigma and discrimination that has largely characterized both national and personal responses to the epidemic, spaces for the expression of collective mourning have been few.
This book engages with multiple forms of visual representation that work variously to compound, undo, and complicate the politics of loss. Drawing on work Thomas did in art and narrative support groups while working with people living with HIV/AIDS in Khayelitsha, a township outside of the city of Cape Town this book also includes analyses of the work of South African visual artists and photographers Jane Alexander, Gille de Vlieg, Jillian Edelstein, Pieter Hugo, Ezrom Legae, Gideon Mendel, Zanele Muholi, Sam Nhlengethwa, Paul Stopforth, and Diane Victor.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 156 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-61148-534-9 • Hardback • October 2013 • $105.00 • (£81.00)

978-1-61148-535-6 • eBook • October 2013 • $99.50 • (£77.00)

Subjects: Art / Art & Politics, Art / African, History / Africa / South / General, Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural, Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, Social Science / Sociology / Urban, Political Science / World / African

Author

Kylie Thomas teaches in the English Department at the University of Stellenbosch.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Language for Mourning
OneSpeaking Bodies
TwoPassing and the Politics of Queer Loss Post-apartheid
ThreeTraumatic Witnessing: Photography and Disappearance
FourMourning the Present
FiveDisavowed Loss during Apartheid and After in the Time of AIDS
SixRefusing Transcendence: The Deaths of Biko and the Archives of Apartheid
(Without) Conclusion: “The Crisis is Not Over”
Bibliography
About the Author

Impossible Mourning

HIV/AIDS and Visuality After Apartheid

Kylie Thomas

Impossible Mourning

HIV/AIDS and Visuality After Apartheid

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