Ancestors and antiretrovirals: the biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in post-apartheid South Africa and breaking the Silence: South African representations of HIV/AIDS

In the vast corpus of academic writing about HIV/AIDS in South Africa, now entering its fifth decade, generational shifts are perceptible. In the earliest texts, scholars in the global North grappled with the medical and social meanings of a new epidemic, emerging in a context of 1980s fiscal conservatism, the resurgence of the moral right in public life, and the backlash against the feminist and gay rights movements. In South Africa, the dismantling of apartheid and the medical challenges posed by HIV/AIDS provided the context in which this first generation of writings emerged. Barry D. Schoub’s AIDS & HIV in perspective: A guide to understanding the virus and its consequences (1994) is one such example. The second generation of texts about HIV/AIDS in South Africa grappled with the political circumstances of the democratic transition, and the medical realities of a burgeoning epidemic. Scholars confronted the questions posed by the fearful consequences of mass mortality from AIDS at precisely the moment of South Africa’s political rebirth, honed in on the crisis of AIDS denialism among the highest echelons of the ANC leadership, and marked the emergence of new forms of advocacy for access to HIV treatment and support. Nicoli Nattrass’s The Moral Economy of AIDS in South Africa (2004) is key among the texts which emerged during this era