“Born dying:” Cultural Futures, Social Space, and the Reproductive Economy in Southern African AIDS Narratives

Abstract

This essay reads several of the pieces in a Southern African AIDS narrative anthology, and attempts to uncover a space of possibility for representing HIV, which, as Brown reminds us, is a prerequisite to fighting it, or at the very least living with it. I hope to suggest that questions of representing, fighting, and living with HIV are also always questions of culture, and that therefore developing a cultural imaginary of and response to HIV is essential to the longer-term human objective of “becoming with” HIV as a species. This cultural imaginary includes not only semiotic representability, but also the capacity to understand futures, and to transform spatial locales into inhabitable place.