Witnessing AIDS addresses testimonial literature produced in response to the AIDS pandemic, focusing on texts by four individuals: filmmaker, painter, activist, and writer Derek Jarman; writer Jamaica Kincaid; anthropologist and media theorist Eric Michaels; and journalist Amy Hoffman. Sarah Brophy outlines the critical framework for interpreting the emphasis on unresolved grief in the emerging body of work. Brophy challenges the tendency to treat AIDS testimonial literature as a genre particular to gay men. By examining Kincaid's and Hoffman's memoirs, in conjunction with the diaries of Michaels and Jarman, Brophy expands the territory of mourning beyond one group of people, an exercise that Brophy feels is important — as well as fundamental — to understanding the depth of personal grief and the ways we respond to grief in literature. In a clear and accessible style, Witnessing AIDS illustrates how memoirs and diaries are used as self-theorizing documents that approach personal testimony as an intervention in cultural memory. The aim of Brophy's work is to develop a framework for reading, one that begins to grasp the significance of unresolved grief in AIDS, its effect upon testimonial writing, and to engage rather than deflect. Visceral investment in the mundane intimacies of illness, death, and grief resituates a number of critical debates at new and provocative intersections as the strategy for understanding continues.

In Reframing Bodies, Roger Hallas illuminates the capacities of film and video to bear witness to the cultural, political, and psychological imperatives of the AIDS crisis. He explains how queer films and videos made in response to the AIDS epidemics in North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa challenge longstanding assumptions about both historical trauma and the politics of gay visibility. Drawing on a wide range of works, including activist tapes, found footage films, autobiographical videos, documentary portraits, museum installations, and even film musicals, Hallas reveals how such “queer AIDS media” simultaneously express both immediacy and historical consciousness. Queer AIDS media are neither mere ideological critiques of the dominant media representation of homosexuality and AIDS nor corrective attempts to produce “positive images” of people living with HIV/AIDS. Rather, they perform complex, mediated acts of bearing witness to the individual and collective trauma of AIDS. Challenging the entrenched media politics of who gets to speak, how, and to whom, Hallas offers a bold reconsideration of the intersubjective relations that connect filmmakers, subjects, and viewers. He explains how queer testimony reframes AIDS witnesses and their speech through its striking combination of direct address and aesthetic experimentation. In addition, Hallas engages recent historical changes and media transformations that have not only displaced queer AIDS media from activism to the archive, but also created new witnessing dynamics through the logics of the database and the remix. Reframing Bodies provides new insight into the work of Gregg Bordowitz, John Greyson, Derek Jarman, Matthias Müller, and Marlon Riggs, and offers critical consideration of important but often overlooked filmmakers, including Jim Hubbard, Jack Lewis, and Stuart Marshall.

Exploring the mechanisms and strategies used in different cultures across Hispano-America and the Caribbean to narrativise, represent and understand HIV/AIDS as a social and human phenomenon, this book examines a wide range of cultural, artistic and media texts, as well as issues of human phenomenology, to understand the ways in which HIV positive individuals make sense of their own lives, and of the ways in which the rest of society sees them. Drawing on a variety of cultural texts from cinema, television, photography and literature, the author considers the manner in which contemporary cultural forms have shaped a body of public opinion in response to the social and cultural impact of HIV/AIDS, re-interpreting the condition in the light of advances in treatment. With attention to both the temporality and spatiality of production, this book examines whether heterosexual and homosexual, and masculine and feminine bodies are narrativised in the same manner, considering the question of whether representations foster discrimination of any kind. The book also asks whether representations across Latin America are homogenous or varied according to national, social or cultural context, and explores the commonalities between the representations of HIV/AIDS in Hispano-America and the Caribbean and other global narratives. A detailed study of the various representations of HIV/AIDS and the construction of public opinion, this book will appeal to scholars of cultural, media and film studies, the sociology of health, the body and illness, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

The Centenary of the World Missionary Conference, held in Edinburgh in 1910, is a suggestive moment for many people seeking direction for Christian mission in the twenty-first century. Since 2005 an international group has worked collaboratively to develop an intercontinental and multidenominational project, now known as Edinburgh 2010, and based at New College, University of Edinburgh.

The Face of AIDS film archive at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, consists of more than 700 hours of unedited and edited footage, shot over a period of more than thirty years and all over the world by filmmaker and journalist Staffan Hildebrand. The material documents the HIV/AIDS pandemic and includes scenes from conferences and rallies, and interviews with activists, physicians, people with the infection, and researchers. It represents a global historical development from the early years of the AIDS crisis to a situation in which it is possible to live a normal life with the HIV virus. This volume brings together a range of academic perspectives – from media and film studies, medical history, gender studies, history, and cultural studies – to bear on the archive, shedding light on memories, discourses, trauma, and activism. Using a medical humanities framework, the editors explore the influence of historical representations of HIV/AIDS and stigma in a world where antiretroviral treatment has fundamentally altered the conditions under which many people diagnosed with HIV live. Organized into four sections, this book begins by introducing the archive and its role, setting it in a global context. The first part looks at methodological, legal and ethical issues around archiving memories of the present which are then used to construct histories of the past; something that can be particularly controversial when dealing with a socially stigmatized epidemic such as HIV/AIDS. The second section is devoted to analyses of particular films from the archive, looking at the portrayal of people living with HIV/AIDS, the narrative of HIV as a chronic illness and the contemporary context of particular films. The third section looks at how stigma and trauma are negotiated in the material in the Face of AIDS film archive, discussing ideas about suffering and culpability. The final section contributes perspectives on and by the filmmaker as activist and auteur. This interdisciplinary collection is placed at the intersection of medical humanities, sexuality studies and film and media studies, continuing a tradition of studies on the cultural and social understandings of HIV/AIDS.

A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film presents a collection of original essays that explore major issues surrounding the state of current documentary films and their capacity to inspire and effect change. Presents a comprehensive collection of essays relating to all aspects of contemporary documentary films Includes nearly 30 original essays by top documentary film scholars and makers, with each thematic grouping of essays sub-edited by major figures in the field Explores a variety of themes central to contemporary documentary filmmakers and the study of documentary film – the planet, migration, work, sex, virus, religion, war, torture, and surveillance Considers a wide diversity of documentary films that fall outside typical canons, including international and avant-garde documentaries presented in a variety of media

Throughout history, creative writers have often tackled topical subjects as a means to engage and influence public discourse. American authors—those born in the States and those who became naturalized citizens—have consistently found ways to be critical of the more painful pieces of the country’s past yet have done so with the patriotic purpose of strengthening the nation’s community and future. In History and Hope in American Literature: Models of Critical Patriotism, Ben Railton argues that it is only through an in-depth engagement with history—especially its darkest and most agonizing elements—that one can come to a genuine form of patriotism that employs constructive criticism as a tool for civic engagement. The author argues that it is through such critical patriotism that one can imagine and move toward a hopeful, shared future for all Americans. Railton highlights twelve works of American literature that focus on troubling periods in American history, including John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath,David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Dave Eggers’s What Is the What. From African and Native American histories to the Depression and the AIDS epidemic, Caribbean and Rwandan refugees and immigrants to global climate change, these works help readers confront, understand, and transcend the most sorrowful histories and issues. In so doing, the authors of these books offer hard-won hope that can help point people in the direction of a more perfect union. History and Hope in American Literature will be of interest to students and practitioners of American literature and history.