Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS – With Neville Hoad

Neville Hoad, Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and co-director of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, discussed his new book, Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS. Hoad’s book talk explored how cultural production—novels, poems, films—about the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa supplemented public discourse. Tracing long historical imaginaries of race, empire, and sex in Botswana, Kenya, and South Africa, Hoad showed that these imaginaries underwrote all attempts to bring the pandemic into public representation. Ann Cvetkovich, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, responded.