Figurations of catastrophe

In "Figurations of Catastrophe: the Poetics and Politics of AIDS Loss" I consider, comparatively, the responses to the AIDS catastrophe in the United States and South Africa. In the first three chapters, I explore the world of artist-mourners to outline their poetics of AIDS loss. I argue that their creative response to AIDS ushers in what I call a poetics of compounded loss: an enterprise entangled in the grief over the death of others and the proximate death of the artists themselves. I pay careful attention to how these artists, as they respond to AIDS, grapple with the body in pain, terminal illness, singular and collective death. Such an exigent enterprise, I argue, challenges the boundaries of extant conventions for mourning and consolation, including the elegy and the obituary, and furthermore presents us with new ways of thinking about and theorizing mourning and melancholia. I also examine the politics of AIDS representation in the United States and South Africa. The figuration of any epidemic is contingent on figures already in circulation to denote health and pathology; and in the U.S. and South Africa, where race is a central pivot, I find instructive the way race informs AIDS discourse. Therefore, in the last chapter, I shift the focus to the politics of representation to analyze how race, health and nationalism are closely calibrated in framing national and global AIDS discourse.