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The Humanities and HIV/AIDS: Where Do We Go from Here?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Gregory Tomso
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Extract

Scholars in the Humanities May be Surprised to Learn That There has Been an Outpouring of New Work on HIV/AIDS by Economists and political scientists in the past few years, as it has finally become clear that the pandemic has seriously impacted governmental operations, redirected state resources, and threatened national and even international security around the globe. This upsurge of interest accentuates the decline in scholarly attention to HIV/AIDS in the humanities that has occurred now that the high tide of AIDS activism has receded across much of the global North and West and nearly a generation has passed since the pandemic first appeared. In an effort to jump-start a second-wave approach to the study of HIV/AIDS in the humanities, I show here how new scholarship in the fields of economics and political economy helps to revitalize questions of subjectivity, epistemology, globalization, and representation that have long been central to the study of HIV/AIDS in traditional humanities disciplines. Given the global reach of the pandemic and the vast technological, disciplinary, and governmental expertise required to contain it, a deliberate yet self-reflexive turn to political economy may help humanities scholars find a foothold in responding to HIV/AIDS. The pandemic has been the catalyst for an entirely new set of techniques of governance related to the health and well-being of nations and global populations—a global biopolitics of HIV/AIDS—yet there is virtually no work in the humanities responding to these dramatic changes.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 125 , Issue 2 , March 2010 , pp. 443 - 453
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

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