'Eat squid not fish': poetics, aesthetics, and HIV/ AIDS in Tanzania (original) (raw)

“…Those Who Did It Have POWER...” Music, Health and Hegemony in Tanzania in the Context of Hiv/Aids

African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music, 2016

This article investigates the display of power relations in the production of health knowledge about HIV/AIDS through music that addresses the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Tanzania. It specifically looks at the intersection of the state and religion in both shaping culture and influencing decision-making in the production of health knowledge on HIV/ AIDS. I argue that the study of HIV/AIDS and the creative process of music about HIV/ AIDS is also the study of power relations at multiple levels. Using two recordings, 'Mambo kwa socks' (Things with socks on) and 'Usione soo, sema naye' (Do not feel shy, speak to him or her), which have been forbidden from public broadcast by the government of Tanzania as evidence, I suggest that musical performances that focus on HIV/AIDS involve the production of multiple, often dissonant and antagonistic interpretations among individuals because of the musical styles employed and because of the interpreters' different ages, social positions, context, social and historical spaces.

Fighting HIV/AIDS through popular Zambian music

Muziki, 2013

ABSTRACT This paper explores how HIV/AIDS education messages are transmitted through popular Zambian music lyrics. The focus is on the recontextualisation of lived experiences and Zambian cultural practices in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Using multimodal discourse analysis, the paper uses Zambian popular music lyrics to show how Zambian musicians deliberately blend languages, socio-cultural artefacts and knowledge into a hybrid of ‘infotainment’ in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The paper concludes that although male dominance is still prevalent, choices regarding sex and discussions on sexual matters are no longer a preserve for the men, and that musicians are able to use language to reframe dominant cultural practices and taboos in the process of disseminating HIV/AIDS messages. This has produced altered social conditions, which sometimes distort the intended messages, but allow musicians to operate without fear of government censorship boards or running foul of cultural taboos.

Risky Beeswax: Artistic Responses to the Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS

York University, 2021

In my dissertation, I examine risk in relation to HIV/AIDS and queer art and sex; and the problem that industrial mitigations of risk pose to sexually active queer men living with HIV, the kinds of sex they want, and the people they fuck in the era of AIDS industry. I explore this problem through four themes that emerged during my interviews with artists whose practices respond to AIDS and/or queer sex: 1) risking the personal; 2) (radical, ludic, and risky) sexual ecologies; 3) AIDS, its intersections and risky representations; and 4) the role of risk in art and artistic practice. I also use methods of participant comprehension, sensory ethnography, participant sensing, and artistic practice. The role of the interviews in helping me select the themes shaped my theoretical conversation and the three interventions that comprise my dissertation: audio, video, and written. Industrial mitigations of risk fetishize HIV status and HIV criminalization in ways that stigmatize queer and HIV-positive sexual practices, communities, and cultures. Risk— as idea and practice—is multidimensional and has been important in HIV/AIDS art/activism since long before AIDS industrialization. I talk about biopolitics and respond to disciplinary- and biopower through Foucault’s concept of pastoral power and his politics of aesthetic self-creation. I understand (and use) risk as a response to hetero- and homo-normative codes, laws, and imperatives. As a ludic counternarrative to homonormativity, I explore constellations of risky sexual and artistic practices as sites of self-creation through the concept of a dynamic continuum of risk that documents, across four decades of AIDS, the outlaw risky sex practices (anonymous, bathhouses, cruising, public sex) that have thrived in every era. I use this concept as a way to understand a collection of practices that argue against industrial mitigations of risk and the normative and gentrifying impacts these mitigations produce: communities of banality and compliance. Through examination and material production of art that responds to risk in AIDS and queer creative and sexual practices, I conclude that practices and processes of making and responding to art create an escape from the precarity of sexual marginalization, homonormativity, and gentrification.

Daughters of Eve: Portrayal of the Female Body in selected HIV/AIDS Songs in Malawi

Journal of Humanities, 2017

This paper examines how the female body is portrayed in selected HIV/AIDS themed songs in Malawi. Generally, the paper reveals how, besides being portrayed negatively as a carrier and transmitter of the HI virus and other sexually transmitted diseases, the female body is implicitly blamed for the spread of HIV and related infections. The paper argues that the songs’ purported advocacy is heavily compromised because they are underwritten by negative perceptions of women and their bodies. Some of these songs also propagate messages that are scientifically wrong, which may mislead the general public. The paper draws on Julia Kristeva’s idea of the “abject” particularly the way it has been appropriated by a school of thought known as “abject criticism”. The paper also employs Josephine Donovan’s observation about the objectified images of women who are usually portrayed as men’s helpers or detractors.

AIDS, Politics, and Music in South Africa

2011

This book offers an original anthropological approach to the AIDS epidemic in South Africa. Based on more than 15 years' association with the region, it demonstrates why AIDS interventions in the former homeland of Venda have failed-and possibly even been counterproductive. It does so through a series of ethnographic encounters, from kings to condoms, which expose the ways in which biomedical understanding of the virus have been rejected by-and incorporated into-local understandings of health, illness, sex, and death. Through the songs of female initiation, AIDS education, and wandering minstrels, the book argues that music is central to understanding how AIDS interventions operate. It elucidates a hidden world of meaning in which people sing about what they cannot talk about, where educators are blamed for spreading the virus, and in which condoms are often thought to cause AIDS. The policy implications are clear: African worldviews must be taken seriously if AIDS interventions in Africa are to become successful.

Syllabus: ART/AIDS/ACTIVISM: Visual Cultures of the Pandemic

Course Abstract: Since 1981, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has dramatically transformed social, cultural, and creative landscapes across the world. From SoHo studios of the 1980's to modern-day AIDS Poster Activism in Toronto, the HIV/AIDS crisis continues to directly shape the life and work of artists from a spectrum of social locations and identities. This course considers the ways by which these artists, activists, and People Living with HIV/AIDS (PWA) have mobilized art, aesthetics, and cultural production as a medium to confront and complicate representations of the pandemic. Through visualizing the cultural history of HIV/AIDS, we will explore artistic and activist engagement through fine art, graphic design, photography, folk art, and video. From the sexual and racial politics of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Keith Haring to the queer and feminist community art of Jessica Lynn Whitbread, this course will introduce students to racialized, queer, and feminist visual cultures of HIV/AIDS art and activism. Course Description: Through surveying a corpus of HIV/AIDS art and visual culture, we will critically engage with the myriad of social, cultural and political factors that have framed our visualization of the pandemic. From the Culture Wars of 1980s to modern debates over visual and digital surveillance, HIV/AIDS have functioned as a barometer of public attitudes about the relationship between the individual and society. The aim of this course is to directly engage this theme of subjectivity, society, and visual culture to destabilize the dynamics of power and representation in the art history of the pandemic. In examining activist responses to HIV/AIDS, we can clearly illustrate the potency of images as a political tool to resist hegemonic institutional and social forces. By contextualizing this political history alongside (inter)related struggles of race, gender, and sexuality, we will trace the emergence of new forms of queer, feminist, and civil rights activism. In focusing on queer, feminist, and racialized artists and activists, this course turns our attention to the communities historically most affected in order to confront traditional visual and cultural representations of HIV/AIDS. The recent canonization of AIDS visual culture over the past decade has been popularly evident in film and television (Dallas Buyer's Club; Rent) and more recently in museum retrospectives (AIDS, Art, America and I, YOU, WE: Art & AIDS). While these new works are vital for a historical understanding of the enduring AIDS epidemic, this nostalgic focus precariously

HIV/AIDS and discourses of stigma and denial: The interventive nature of music performance

2014

Chapter 4: Towards an 'HIV+ society': The interventive nature of music performance Rarely is an extensive piece of work such as this a product of a single person's endeavour. Various people contributed to having this project not only see the light of day but also come to completion. Not in any particular order, I owe my gratitude to you all. Ms Cecilia du Plessis, then a subject librarian for music at the UNISA library, sourced for me literature on music (art) and HIV/AIDS when very little existed. Dr Paul Attinello, my thanks for sending me literature on music and HIV/AIDS when I hardly knew exactly which direction this research would go. Your email correspondence and generous conversation about numerous questions, sent while you were resident between Hong Kong and Australia, were never in vain. Fortunately, you will see their outcome! Dr Lara Allen, your enthusiasm about my work in our conversation laid the groundwork of a much longer process than we had both initially envisaged. And your notion of 'ethnomusicology with a mission' has led me to the completion of this task as much as it has made me aware of the role our research as ethnomusicologists can play in society. Hopefully, this work is a first step towards that 'mission'. But most importantly, I thank you for leading me to 'Christine'-more about that later. In quite diverse ways, you all played an important role in encouraging me and most importantly 'making things happen' in order that I can finally complete this project:

Epidemic Imaginary: Performing Global Figurations of "Third World AIDS

Space and Culture, 2006

This article is a narrative experiment written in the hope of illuminating "Third World AIDS" less as a geographically situated pandemic than as dispersed and dispersing encounters of mobile figurations. Using HIV/AIDS in Thailand as a case, the author argues that to move beyond the dominant understanding of "Third World AIDS" today-influenced mainly by epidemiology and anthropology-we need to attend to a mobile mediascape that manages to bypass the medicoethnographic sphere to invest in discursive encounters, awaiting framing and materialization. As such, this article posits the performative movement of figurative imagination as an alternative materiality, one that engages with the "diseased other" ethically and postnationally. While AIDS rages on in the 21st century, the narrative/figurative encounters staged in this article continue to present an uneasy picture about nation, gender, (queer) sex, activism, and power.