Memory Connection Journal

Abstract

Abstract

In this essay, I seek to imagine not only the global AIDS pandemic but pandemic
memory on a global scale. Toward that end, I join those who have critiqued the
whiteness and US-centricity of AIDS memory and craft an opening vision of an
AIDS global memoryscape.

In the introduction for the 2012 forum commemorating the 25th anniversary
of the grassroots AIDS activist group ACT UP, I opened with this observation:
“AIDS, from the beginning, has been a mnemonic pandemic.”¹ I had in mind
the pervasiveness of mourning politics that constituted, locally and nationally,
individually and collectively, epidemic remembrance. Like most memory
scholars who have written about HIV/AIDS, I also focused exclusively on U.S.
contexts though I used the word “pandemic,” suggesting cognizance of but
not attentiveness toward HIV/AIDS’ global stretch and stakes. In fact, none of
my writing and teaching on AIDS memory, spanning more than fifteen years,
has crossed U.S. borders into global contexts or considered transnational
memorialization. In what follows, I seek rectification of this myopia, an opening
redirection into the pandemic as a global memoryscape, what Kendall Phillips and
Mitch Reyes describe as globalization’s impact on the movement, contact, and
contests of remembrance.²

My earlier memory configurations replicate patterns that more broadly
have stymied global memoryscapes, focusing as they have on gay white men as
the centerpiece of traumatic and hagiographic queer memory, and by centering
them excluding so many others, especially non-white, non-Western lives, so
many still decimated by HIV/AIDS. Karma Chávez and Nishant Shahani have
taken a wider critical view, arguing that this commemorative boom starring
white gay men narrows and recalibrates the narrative of the epidemic at the cost,
memorially and materially, of intersectional and transnational remembrance,
coalition, movement, with ongoing necropolitical implications, obliterations, what
Shahani describes as “an evacuation of queer memory that paradoxically operates
under the guise of commemoration.”³ In his analysis critiquing the epidemic’s
whitewashing in recent representations of AIDS history, Shahani troubles the
“restorative gesture of historiographic heroism” of films such as How to Survive
a Plague that laud ACT UP’s mostly white gay male protagonists’ triumphant
interventions into biomedical discourse.⁴ The problem, Shahani argues, is that
such memory work’s emplotment and temporality distort the global political
economy of AIDS, past and present—a complex transnational matrix that
includes for instance, as he explains, “patent regimes, economic restrictions, and
structural adjustments.”⁵ This queer commemorative impoverishment demands
what he prescribes as different, ongoing modes of “bearing witness.”⁶ Such a
perspective syncs with Phillips’ and Reyes’ recommendation that “the dynamics
of global forces can be seen as influencing and altering local and national
memories and memory practices in ways that will be more intelligible when
rendered within a framework of global memory than if understood solely in
relation to local and national forces.”⁷

Both Shihani and Chávez draw on the neglected archive of ACT UP to perform and
model transnational commemoration. In Chávez’s research, she remembers ACT
UP’s New York protests denouncing the detention of HIV+ Haitian refugees at
Guantánamo in 1992-93, and more broadly the ban on HIV+ migration in the U.S.
dating to 1987.⁸ Shahani’s locus is the other coast during the same period, bringing
to the fore the history of ACT UP Golden Gate’s
call for industrialized nations to establish a global development fund that
would help countries in the Global South meet health- care needs; an
international standardization for drug approval to improve global access;
the creation of an international data bank so that knowledge and biomedical
research on the AIDS epidemic would be easily accessible; and finally, a
recognition that because global poverty was a crucial factor in higher rates of
seroprevalence, a redistribution of military spending to health care and social
services was crucial.⁹

He recalls the work of San Francisco activists in collaboration with the Nicaragua
AIDS Education Project for fundraising and deploying that project as a model
for the Global North, remembering the life and activism of Jorge Cotińas who
doggedly, vigorously, and eloquently resisted intersecting racist and xenophobic
immigration, deportation, and health polices at the INS and elsewhere. Chávez
avers that a global memoryscape is crucial for coalition building in the present and
future.¹⁰ Shahani shares this perspective, concluding, “Highlighting this coalitional
labor is not an act of restorative nostalgia as much as it is a way of mobilizing
archival memory to attend to the biopoliticization of AIDS through continued
pharmaceutical profiteering, a regime of intellectual “rights” that mediates drug
affordability, and patent exclusivity that is implicated in a form of necropolitics.”¹¹

In my own emergent aspiration, I seek to displace paltry and damaging
transnational narratives that, if they register at all, have been preoccupied with
salacious and erroneous global sexual mapping of Canadian flight attendant
Gaëtan Dugas, infamous “Patient Zero,” or the “geography of blame,” as Paul
Farmer described it, of competing contagious accusations about the foreign
origins of pandemic destruction.¹² By contrast, I imagine transnational queer
and HIV/AIDS memories curated and circulated via what Matthew Houdek calls
“global archival memory . . . a memory-centered space for such critical dialogue,
deliberation, and debate, making transnationally public what was previously
fixed within geopolitical boundaries, delimited to the past, or hung upon the
mantel of universal ownership.”¹³ Houdek’s concept emerged from a study of
UNESCO’s “Memory of the World Project” which, in addition to other problems
he elucidates, I would add does not include a specific project that aims to preserve
the documentary history of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Although there are multiple diverse national, institutional, community, and
grassroots HIV/AIDS archives and history projects across North America,
Australia, Europe, Africa, and elsewhere, there is to my knowledge no global
archival HIV/AIDS memory project, akin, say, to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum’s World Memory Project,¹⁴ with its 3500 contributors and 1.9 million
records globally. The deeply moving Instagram project #theaidsmemorial,¹⁵
founded in the United Kingdom, an archive that has memorialized the lives of
those lost to AIDS through pictures and vignettes posted by thousands, no doubt
desires to be a platform for constituting global memoryscape but to date only
represents the Global North.

With an eye toward global coalitional curation and archival catalysts for
global political and humanitarian coalition, I nominate for this archive a few
contributions I have been pondering. I think of Ugandan Noerine Kaleeba,¹⁶ whose
desperate grief for her dying husband Christopher in the mid-1980s took her to
Geneva and the World Health Organization, where she befriended and ultimately
collaborated with Dr. Jonathan Mann.¹⁷ Mann had formed the meteoric Global
Programme on AIDS, premised in no small part on fighting stigma, prejudice,
and discrimination as well as the virus itself, and who believed that thwarting
the predicted pandemic would require transnational perspective and strategy.
His tenure and ouster at the WHO remind us of the importance of institutional
memory and forgetting for the global memoryscape. Kaleeba herself would go
on to found the grassroots organization TASO (The AIDS Support Organization)
in 1986, over time directly impacting infection rates across Uganda.
Who remembers Mann and Kaleeba?

I think too of Ugandan Beatrice Were,¹⁸ co-founder in 1992 of the National
Community of Women Living with HIV, and her collaboration with Carol Lindsay
Smith from the UK, bringing Smith’s Memory Book Project to Africa. The Memory
book is an individual and communal endeavor empowering women dying of
AIDS to prepare their children for life without them through the creation of
curated stories and photographs in a book that shares family history and cultural
traditions, that resists stigma through disclosure and counternarrative, and
that teaches prevention through discussion of the disease. The Ugandan project
sparked the International Memory Project, taking the Memory Book across
Africa. American ethnomusicologist Gregory Barz did field work in 2002 specific
to Memory Books in Uganda. He wrote: “The sounds of their mothers are made
permanently alive within the pages of these books, as they re-memory the songs
and dances their mothers once performed, providing not only information and
details of the child’s family of origin, but perhaps more importantly a source of
identity that emerges only within re-memories.”¹⁹

During this same period in Ethiopia an art collective called Sudden Flowers,
founded in 1999 by Duke University graduate student Eric Gottesman, Hope for
Africa NGO founder Yawoinshet Masresha, and six AIDS orphans in Addis Ababa,
curated community memory through photographs and letters penned by children
to their deceased parents, creating exhibitions and a widely praised book of the
same name. The collaboration queered the colonizing lens by putting cameras into
these young hands, addressing trauma and resisting stigma, and circulating these
images and texts globally.²⁰

Finally, closer to home, my late colleague Daniel Brouwer and I, through
fieldwork and critical rhetorical memory studies, have considered the
prospects of transnational intergenerational racial social justice work in AIDS
commemoration.²¹ We pursued epidemic rhetorics that catalyze the rising up of
the unclaimed indigent, undocumented, and POC AIDS dead buried on the remote
and accessibility-challenged potter’s field on Hart Island in Long Island Sound off
the coast of the Bronx in New York. There have resided since the late nineteenth
century hundreds of thousands of dead who because of race, immigration,
poverty, and disease are buried in obscurity, memory impoverishment sustained,
until recently, through the long governance of this “cemetery” by the New York
State Department of Corrections. Endemic memory constraints—awareness,
accessibility, stewardship, bias and prejudice—have been challenged by The Hart
Island Project, founded by Melinda Hunt.²² Through lawsuits and public memory
work, Hunt and HIP have pursued commemorative intervention through policy
challenge, archival facilitation, and “engaged storytelling” by making visitation,
public records and institutional history more accessible and transparent, and by
generating remembrance with its digital Traveling Cloud Museum. Significantly,
HIP launched its AIDS Initiative “to identify people who died of AIDS buried on
Hart Island and preserve their stories.”²³ Most have understood The Hart Island
Project and its AIDS Initiative as a local and national intervention, but there is
also great promise in its excavation of a global memoryscape yet to be told.

My hope in this initial foray into imagining global archival memory of
HIV/AIDS is in the prospects of contributing to a decentralizing of U.S.
HIV/AIDS remembrance by placing it in transnational contexts and circuitries,
from Hart Island to Kampala, Osaka to Oman, Moscow to Montevideo. Such
global archival memory, if successful, would mobilize coalitional curation,
engagement, and deployment of pandemic memories that corroborate Phillips’
and Reyes’ vision of the global memoryscape as “a complex and vibrant plane
upon which memories emerge, are contested, transform, encounter other
memories, mutate, and multiply.”²⁴

Endnotes

1. Charles E. Morris III, “ACT UP 25: HIV/AIDS, Archival Queers, and Mnemonic
World Making,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (February 2012): 49.
2. Kendall R. Phillips and G. Mitchell Reyes, Global Memoryscapes: Contesting
Remembrance in a Transnational Age (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama
Press, 2011).
3. Nishant Shahani, “How to Survive the Whitewashing of AIDS:
Global Pasts, Transnational Futures,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ
Worldmaking 3, no. 1 (2016): 4.
4. Shahani, “How to Survive the Whitewashing of AIDS,” 3.
5. Shahani, “How to Survive the Whitewashing of AIDS,” 17.
6. Shahani, “How to Survive the Whitewashing of AIDS,” 18.
7. Phillips and Reyes, Global Memoryscapes, 18.
8. Karma R. Chávez, “ACT UP, Haitian Migrants, and Alternative Memories of HIV/
AIDS,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012): 63–68. See also Karma
R. Chávez, The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2021).
9. Shahani, “How to Survive the Whitewashing of AIDS,” 19.
10. Chávez, “ACT UP,” 67.
11. Shahani, “How to Survive the Whitewashing of AIDS,” 27.
12. Richard A. McKay, Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2017); Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and
the Geography of Blame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
13. Matthew Houdek, “The Rhetorical Force of ‘Global Archival Memory’: (Re)
Situating Archives Along the Global Memoryscape,” Journal of International and
Intercultural Communication 9, no. 3 (2016): 217.
14. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, World Memory Project: https://
www.ushmm.org/online/world-memory-project/
15. theaidsmemorial: https://www.instagram.com/theaidsmemorial/
16. “Interview with Noerine Kaleeba,” Age of AIDS (Frontline, 2006): https://www.
pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/interviews/kaleeba.html
17. Stephen P. Marks, “Jonathan Mann’s Legacy to the 21st Century: The Human
Rights Imperative for Public Health,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 29, no. 2
(Summer 2001): 131–138.
18. Beatrice Were, “Memory Project History in Uganda”: https://www.
memorybooks.org.uk/beatrice-were
19. Gregory Barz, Singing for Life: HIV/AIDS and Music in Uganda (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 205.
20. See Dagmawi Woubshet, The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in
the Early Ear of AIDS (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2015).
21. Daniel C. Brouwer and Charles E. Morris III, “Decentering Whiteness in AIDS
Memory: Indigent Rhetorical Criticism and the Dead of Hart Island,” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 107, no. 2 (May 2021): 160-184.
22. The Hart Island Project: https://www.hartisland.net/
23. The Hart Island Project, AIDS Initiative: https://www.hartisland.net/aids_
initiative
24. Phillips and Reyes, Global Memoryscapes, 14.

Bibliography

The AIDS Memorial: https://www.instagram.com/theaidsmemorial/
Barz, Gregory. Singing for Life: HIV/AIDS and Music in Uganda. New York:
Routledge, 2006.
Brouwer, Daniel C. and Charles E. Morris III. “Decentering Whiteness in AIDS
Memory: Indigent Rhetorical Criticism and the Dead of Hart Island.” Quarterly
Journal of Speech 107, no. 2 (2021): 160-184.
Chávez, Karma R. “ACT UP, Haitian Migrants, and Alternative Memories of HIV/
AIDS.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012): 63–68.
Chávez, Karma R. The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2021.
Farmer, Paul. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006.
The Hart Island Project: https://www.hartisland.net/
Houdek, Matthew. “The Rhetorical Force of ‘Global Archival Memory’: (Re)
Situating Archives Along the Global Memoryscape.” Journal of International and
Intercultural Communication 9, no. 3 (2016): 204-221.
Marks, Stephen P. “Jonathan Mann’s Legacy to the 21st Century: The Human
Rights Imperative for Public Health.” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 29, no. 2
(2001): 131–138.
McKay, Richard A. Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Morris III, Charles E. “ACT UP 25: HIV/AIDS, Archival Queers, and Mnemonic
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Phillips, Kendall R. and G. Mitchell Reyes. Global Memoryscapes:
Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age. Tuscaloosa, AL: University
of Alabama Press, 2011.
Public Broadcasting System. “Interview with Noerine Kaleeba.” Frontline. Age of
AIDS, 2006: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/interviews/kaleeba.
html
Shahani, Nishant. “How to Survive the Whitewashing of AIDS: Global Pasts,
Transnational Futures.” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 3, no. 1 (2016): 1-33.
Were, Beatrice. “Memory Project History in Uganda”: https://www.memorybooks.
org.uk/beatrice-were
Woubshet, Dagmawi. The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the
Early Ear of AIDS. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2015.

Biographical Notes

Charles E. Morris III is professor of rhetorical studies and LGBTQ studies
at Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA. He is co-founding editor of QED:
A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (Michigan State University Press). He has
published numerous essays on queer/ing public memory, and his books include
Remembering the AIDS Quilt.
cemorris@syr.edu