Overview

"This study identifies and explores the metaphor of ""contagion"" that both celebrates the diasporic spread of African culture, and serves as the justification of its repression. She compares the association of HIV with increased Western anxieties over the risks of other forms of ""contagion"" - accelerated economic, cultural and migrational flows around the globe - with the response of artists, who often reclaim the notion of African ""infection"" by suggesting that diasporic culture is contagious, irresistible - but vital, life-giving and productive. The essays in this book examine both the vital and violent ways in which recent associations have been made between the AIDS pandemic and African diasporic cultural practices, including religious worship, music, dance, sculpture, painting, orature, literature and film. While pointing to the lengthy and complex history of the metaphor of African contagion, Browning argues that in its politicized, life-affirming embodiment, the figure might actually teach us to respond to epidemia humanely."

Full Product Details

Author:   Barbara Browning
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.60cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.430kg
ISBN:  

9780415919814

ISBN 10:   0415919819
Pages:   248
Publication Date:   26 March 1998
Audience:   College/higher education ,  General/trade ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Introduction; Chapter 1 Babaluaiyé; Chapter 2 Compact World; Chapter 3 Lutte contre les moustiques; Chapter 4 African Medicine Men; Chapter 5 Voodoo Economics; Chapter 6 Mixing Bloods; Chapter 7 Cyberspace, Voodoo Sex, and Retroviral Identity; Chapter 8 Benetton; Chapter 9 Penetrable Selves (“;Paris Is Burning”); Chapter 10 The Closed Body; NOTES; INDEX;

Reviews

Infectious Rhythm fills an important gap in the literature on AIDS and international race relations. In a style as lyrical as it is tough-minded, Browning offers a brilliant reading of figures of transmission, both viral and cultural. This eloquent book provides the most powerful testimony yet to how metaphors of seepage and contamination are, from the outset, expresssions of social fear and political anxiety. <br>-Diana Fuss <br> Browning is a clear writer and a creative thinker who eschews postmodern jargon to a large degree, even while elaborarting on concepts at the movement's core.. <br>-Journal of Cultural Geography, Steven C. Dinero, Philadelphia College <br>

Author Information

Barbara Browning is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. She is the author of Samba: Resistance in Motion.

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