AIDS Postmemory in the 21st Century: Rethinking the HIV Crisis Today

Abstract

In this paper, I contend that both HIV and AIDS must continue to be seen as crises if thepandemic is ever to be brought to an end. I start by exploring the presence of death imageryin Danez Smith’s poetry in light of Marianne Hirsch (2008) and Samuel O’Donoghue’s (2018)reflections on postmemory, arguing that AIDS haunts the experience of HIV in Smith’s workin the form of postmemory. Based on this idea, I engage with the ongoing debate about the“post-crisis era” (Kagan, 2018; Rofes, 1998), and critical “post-AIDS discourse” (Basu et al.,2022; Walker, 2020) to claim that postmemory constitutes one of the multiple expressions of the“network of crises” which AIDS and HIV continue to be in the 21st century (Cheng et al., 2020).