Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The global outbreak of HIV/AIDS coincided with an increase in critical reflexivity around language and public health in the academy, as well as the rise of the illness narrative. Scholars agree that HIV/AIDS has been profoundly integrated into the popular and sociological imagination, yet in South Africa – the country struck hardest - analyses of the AIDS discourse have been governed by diagnoses of “silence.” I argue this perception extends beyond the silences stemming from denial or stigma, and reflects a residual “memory” of colonial tropes that percolates into current epistemic frameworks, overriding and delegitimising existing narratives. This lingering archive exerts discursive pressure over emerging attempts to find expression, creating an environment in which texts must continually work to counter “negative interpretations” (Mbembe 2001) that seek to mediate or limit their legibility. In this paper, I open with an evaluation of what I term the discursive production of silence around HIV/AIDS in post-apartheid South Africa, and describe how this has affected engagement with HIV/AIDS in literature and its reception in the country. As such, it makes a case for more systematically integrating analysis of the politics of cultural production into literary criticism, particularly in contexts of historical inequality.