Join us for a lecture by Mandisa Mbali (University of Cape Town) exploring literary and artistic responses to the AIDS epidemic in South Africa. The lecture will be held on 28 October at 15:00 in the LIC0.04 Learning Theatre (Learning and Innovation Centre).
Mandisa Mbali is an Associate Professor in Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. Her main research interest is in health policy and activism, considered historically, as interrelated phenomena, both transnationally and within South Africa. She has explored this theme in book chapters and journal articles on AIDS activism and policies, health, gender and sexuality and the politics of race and ethics in international health. In 2013 she published her scholarly monograph South African AIDS Activism and Global Health Politics with Palgrave Macmillan as part of their Global Ethics series. More recently, her work has analysed transnational debates over apartheid and medical humanitarianism in late twentieth century South Africa.
"Methods at An End? AIDS, Literary Ethnography and Multimodal History in South Africa"
It was not so long ago that the rhetoric of a global end to AIDS as thinkable and achievable became dominant in the media and global public health circles. US President Donald Trump’s recent withdrawal of funding from the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has, however, once more raised the spectre of tens of thousands more new HIV infections and thousands of additional preventable AIDS deaths in South Africa. This lecture focuses on the early 2000s and brings together works of art exhibited at the Durban Art Gallery and South African fiction such as Damon Galgut’s The Promise (considered ethnography) to examine notions of “an end” in three methodological senses: firstly, to explore the ethical and political dilemmas (and desirable “ends”) for historians when they adopt means to examine earlier periods of mass death of people with spoiled identities. Secondly, it explores the expansive possibilities and limitations of simultaneously interpreting sources multimodally, that is, with different creative modes of representation (visual and literary) to understand extreme emotions; namely, abjection both in people shown and described as living with AIDS in the absence of HIV treatment (an end of meaning) and the way in which audiences must grapple with the potential trauma of reckoning with very high rates of suffering where the extremity of the factual seems to border on the surreal (and, even, imaginary). In this sense, it argues that final perfection is improbable both in terms of conquering the epidemic itself (for the foreseeable future) and in terms of obtaining emotional, moral and intellectual finality when it comes to interpreting it as scholars.
