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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Woubshet, Dagwami. "Figurations of Catastrophe: the Poetics and Politics of AIDS Loss," History of American Civilization, Harvard University, June 2007. Advisor: Marc Shell
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 pay careful attention to the poetics of AIDS loss in the United States; and, in the last chapter, I examine the politics of AIDS representation in the United States and South Africa. I rely on the world of artist-mourners to outline a poetics of AIDS loss. I argue that their creative responses to AIDS usher 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. Such an exigent enterprise 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, theorizing mourning and melancholia. 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 AIDS discourse in both the United States and South Africa.
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