Tony Kushner’s Angels in America plays a crucial role in expanding the conversation on AIDS and political partisanship. This is not to argue that Angels in America can only be explained as a political commentary on AIDS because the play is far more than that. However, the production does force the readers to acknowledge the […]
Read More →Archive for April, 2019
Social Critique and Dreams in Kushner’s Angels in America
Hi everyone! For the next four classes, we will finally be discussing Kushner’s Angels in America, for which the augmenters’ posts about Wojnarowicz may come into our discussion. In class, we’ve been talking a lot about contagion narratives and how they’re structured. More specifically, we’ve identified that, for example, the disease is never the main […]
Read More →HIV/AIDS Issue in South Africa
This video shows the story of a man in a town near Johannesburg that due to the HIV/AIDS outbreak there, has become a serial rapist in order to “cleanse” himself of the disease and spread it around the community. He does this so he would not have to “die alone” and gains power in being […]
Read More →Contagion, Cosmopolitanism, Hillbrow
Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) helps us tie together some threads or strands that have run through several readings in this course. Specifically, it addresses issues such as the relationship between communication and communicable disease (a topic running all the way back to Sampson’s Virality), the weight of history and tradition, the effects of […]
Read More →Vigilantism in Johannesburg and Welcome to our Hillbrow
In 2008, Louis Theroux traveled to Johannesburg, South Africa to make a documentary about the private security situation there. As the government is unable to provide adequate security to its inhabitants, private groups emerge to reinforce the order, however, by means of crime and violence. In a short clip called “Brutal Interrogation”, Louis Theroux met […]
Read More →Tough, resistant and collaborative
Similar to cholera, tuberculosis has been existence. There’s a world health day (March 24) for tuberculosis to keep raising awareness of the disease. There is a cure for cholera and there should be one for tuberculosis, since they have both existed for the longest time. Well, right and wrong. Right because TB can because there […]
Read More →Convener’s Post – Welcome to Our Hillbrow
Phaswane Mpe’s novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow depicts life in the downtrodden communities of post-apartheid South Africa. In his book, he presents the stories of lives cut short by the ravages of sex, disease, and crime that appear to echo his own experiences in these neighbourhoods. Despite the prevalence of death, however, Mpe seems to […]
Read More →Nosedive
The state of the privileged community in Ding Village is very comparable to “Black Mirror”. While the entire show is centered around the future of humanity in its advanced technological state, the episode Nosedive is almost a perfect parallel to the events that take place in Ding Village. The premise of the episode is that […]
Read More →Ghost cities
I was struck, while reading a 2016 interview with Zhao Liang, the director of the documentary Together, by the following description of China’s contemporary “ghost cities”: There are hundreds of ghost cities like that in China. They are nearly everywhere: in “tier 1” cities [metropolises], in “tier 2” cities [provincial capitals], and “tier 3” cities […]
Read More →Filming Ding Village/Henan AIDS crisis
From Yan Li, who took this course in the spring of 2015: As promised, here is the link to the full movie based on Dream of Ding Village. This movie is directed by Gu Changwei, one of the most famous “fifth generation directors” in China, and performed by many famous Chinese actors, such as Zhang Ziyi. You […]
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