Jenny Doubt on Activism, Historiography and HIV/AIDS: Local and Global Perspectives
image c/o Ian Bradley-Perrin and Vincent Chevalier/PosterVirus
The author of this post, Jenny Doubt, is a postdoctoral affiliate at CEREV. In collaboration with Ian Bradley-Perrin (MA candidate, History), she is developing a ‘prototype exhibition’ examining the implications of the development of legal and media-led master narratives about HIV/AIDS in Canada.
Two documentaries charting the considerable contributions of now-prominent groups of AIDS activists recently appeared: How to Survive a Plague (David France, 2012) and Fire in the Blood (Dylan Mohan Gray, 2013). Plague tells the story of two US-based activist coalitions, ACT-UP and the Treatment Action Group (TAG), as they confront the American medical and political establishment during the 1980s and 90s in an attempt to transform AIDS from being a death sentence to a manageable health condition through the acquisition of antiretroviral medication. Fire brings us to the global south, and stages a similar conflict between the western pharmaceutical industry – in particular the intellectual patents that protect the profits of big pharmaceutical companies in the United States and United Kingdom – and the struggle for the affordable generic treatments required to mitigate the mass devastation visited on the populations in the global south by HIV/AIDS – in particular in Africa and Asia. Both documentaries are based on considerable archival footage: Plague draws from ‘never before seen’ archival footage from ACT UP, while the considerable efforts of Zachie Achmat’s South African Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) provide an important narrative arch to Fire. Together these two documentaries made me wonder about the process we seem to have arrived at in the HIV/AIDS epidemic: that of documenting its histories. In particular, I wonder about the roles that memory and cultural imperialism may come to play in moulding these histories. Is there a place for the expression of nostalgia given the intersection of memory in narratives that depict important challenges to state and multinational power structures?
Nostalgia has informed various studies and publications examining the function of memory in the post-apartheid era in South Africa, including two contributions that emerged in print in 2010: Jacob Dlamini’s memoir Native Nostalgia and Dennis Walder’s broader literary criticism Postcolonial Nostalgias. My doctoral research looks in part at attempts to curate and consolidate an ‘HIV/AIDS archive’ in South Africa, and thus takes memory as one of its central tenets. Taking into consideration museum spaces such as the new virtual Museum of AIDS in Africa, but also international art exhibitions such as Not Alone (2010) as well as South Africa’s considerable, politically engaged theatre tradition, it asks what the formal and informal history-making endeavours around HIV/AIDS are in South Africa. How are they instrumental in creating both personal and national rememberings that speak to South Africa’s mandate to face its past in order to be held accountable to its future?
More recently in Canada and the United States, the introduction of nostalgia in activist HIV/AIDS discourses has proven to be incendiary. Responses to Concordia graduate student Ian Bradley-Perrin’s AIDS poster ‘Your Nostalgia is Killing Me’ (see above), which he and co-creator Vincent Chevalier contributed to the 2013 Poster Virus competition, illustrates this clearly. The poster’s viral circulation incited debates and challenges from various demographics, ultimately asking whether the HIV/AIDS histories (especially American ones) that are produced need necessarily be legible and meaningful to AIDS activists who contributed to the fight against HIV/AIDS? The poster, which depicts a ‘teenage bedroom’ surrounded with the paraphernalia of an increasingly recognizable HIV/AIDS canon confronts viewers with how HIV/AIDS is represented in the popular and public sphere and asks whether, in looking back, are we failing to look forward?
Recently, these issues were debated in a panel discussion featuring notable contributors such as author John Weir and artist Avram Finkelstein at the ‘Your Nostalgia is Killing Me’ event at the New York Public Library (NYPL) on 1 March 2014. The discussion was followed by working groups comprised of HIV/AIDS activists, academics, public intellectuals, film-makers (Jim Hubbard, Sarah Schulman), artists and writers debating a number of issues raised in the panel discussion. One felt, sitting in the room, that most people present had made or were making significant contributions to the ‘war on AIDS’, to draw on the metaphor Susan Sontag delineated so powerfully in AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989). And yet it was not the collective contribution represented by the room, but the racial and generational fissures that contributed rigour to the debates that followed the panel discussion. These working groups asked who has the right to set the agenda for HIV/AIDS today? Can we develop academic criticism of histories that have as their starting point the significant life-altering devastation of needless personal loss? And perhaps most notably: Who is omitted from this increasingly canonized history?
The NYPL event followed a panel discussion ‘Flash Collectives: Creating Agile Strategies for Social Change’ held the night before at the Brooklyn Community Pride Center, in which, Ian Bradley-Perrin, Mary Caple, and I spoke about the Collective Strategies for Visual Production workshop that CEREV hosted in January. The Centre is a public community space that lies in the heart of downtown Brooklyn. Frequented by HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ community members, the event was populated with the concerns of activists and HIV/AIDS-affected individuals and artists trying to register pressing initiatives and lived experiences that need to be addressed by the community at large. The panel addressed the inspiration behind arranging the CEREV workshop, mechanisms put in place to ensure that it achieved the its goals, organizational logistics, experiences of some of the participants, and events that the workshop has since generated.
At the NYPL, macrohistories were discussed, specifically American macrohistories, while in the community space of the Brooklyn Pride Centre, individuals offered testimonies that comprise their personal histories. It speaks to the differences of these two public spaces addressing HIV/AIDS that the panelists at the Brooklyn event were invited to share strategies that best serve those who continue to fight HIV/AIDS in the trenches. The debates that played out at the NYPL are similar to those that play out in South Africa and other parts of the global South: the AIDS epidemic has mobilized debates about who can speak, which have been taken-up by other constituencies at various points in history. Alongside these debates I can’t help but reflect that it’s important to remember that the gains achieved as a result of the struggles that these macrohistories represent are still being sought out in the lives of those whom the discussion of history is leaving behind.
Jenny Doubt is a 2014 postdoctoral fellow at CEREV and was one of the participants in “Collective Strategies for Visual Production on the Issue of HIV Criminalization.” This workshop took place in the CEREV Exhibition Lab in January 2014 and was led by New York-based artist, activist, and writer Avram Finkelstein. She received a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Open University, UK and an MA in Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures from University of Sussex. Her dissertation, Performing and Inscribing HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa, investigates how cultural texts intervene in debates about HIV/AIDS and help empower the most vulnerable among the HIV-affected in post-apartheid South Africa.
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