Representation, Rhetoric and the Construction of Global Geographies of Aids
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REPORTING AIDS: REPRESENTATION, RHETORIC AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF GLOBAL GEOGRAPHIES OF AIDS by MATTHEWHENDERSON LITTLE B.A. (Hons.), The University of Oxford, 1988 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTEROF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Departmentof Geography) We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA October 1994 © MatthewHenderson Little, 1994 _____________ In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. (Signature Department of The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada ( I Date DE-6 (2/88) Reporting AIDS: Representation, Rhetoric and the Construction of Global Geographies of AIDS Abstract I aim to examine some of the complex personal, political and popular geographies generative of, encoded in and legitimated by the ‘epidemic of signification’: the construction of AIDS through discourse and language. Peter Gould’s popularly-oriented book The Slow Plague is, arguably, Geography’s most significant entry to date into this discourse and Slim: A Reporter’s Own Story ofAIDS in East Africa forms a key part of the same ‘epidemic’. It was written by Ed Hooper, a journalist and photographer for the BBC and Guardian, who produced several of the early ‘AIDS in Africa’ Western media representations. Both men write ‘authoritatively’ about AIDS, aim to serve the ‘public’, and rely upon the rhetorics of science, objective journalism and empire for the powerful conveyance of their stories and respective geographical knowledges. The signifying practices and rhetoric they use encode and legitimate a wide variety of aspirations, meanings, beliefs, attitudes, ideas and actions. I am attempting to unravel their complex narratives: focussing initially on a critique of Gould’s concept of science; then interrogating the explicitly visual and scientific geography Gould aims to situate within the AIDS research paradigm. I use Slim to examine the mechanics of construction of the ‘AIDS in Africa’ Western media discourse, focussing both on the formative and intense discursive moment of the late 1980s and on more recent media representations of ‘AIDS in Africa’. This allows these representations to be situated within a specific and revealing personal and political diseconomy of capital, access, perception and production. By unravelling these respective narratives I aim to map part of the complex political and critical terrain that a Human and humane Geography must negotiate if it is to respond to the complex AIDS geographies revealed. 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract Table of Contents iii List of Figures V INTRODUCFION 1 Chapter One Spatial Science and Savage Pictures: The Geographer Reports on AIDS 5 Introduction 5 Gould’s Critique of AIDS science 8 Geography into the Breach 11 The Paradox of Critique 19 Enlightenment Inheritors: Gould and Habermas 26 Vision and Geography: Telling Necessary Fictions 33 Gould’s Spatialisation of HIV and AIDS: Cutting the Cloth 36 Gould’s Visualisation of H1V and AIDS: Metaphors and Maps Before Our Very Eyes 41 Seeing Place Through a Zoom Lens 45 Geographers’ Savage Pictures: AIDS Out of Africa? 49 Conclusion 54 Chapter Two On Safari: A Journalist’s Own Story of AIDS in East Africa 63 Introduction 63 Where the Story Begins 63 Rhetoric and Representation: the literary construction of Slim 75 A Quest for Truth on a Potholed Road 75 Smitten by Uganda 77 looper’s ‘Africa’ 82 AIDS from an Isolated and Forgotten Land 85 AIDS and Modernity 87 An Inexplicable Medical Disaster? 89 Diseconomies of Production: the literal construction of Slim 92 Commodifying 92 Moving 97 Seeing 100 111 The AIDS ‘safari’ 101 1. A Widow and a Funeral 103 2. Florence 104 3. Mirina 109 4. Beatrice 110 Conclusion 111 Affecting 112 The Journalists’ “Service Industry” 117 Conclusion 125 Chapter Three A Continent Under Siege: The Western Media Report on ‘AIDS in Africa’ 131 Introduction 131 A Continent’s Agony: The New York Times 140 A New Agony: The Times of London 147 Back to Buffalo Bill’s: The Guardian 154 The Use of Florence’s Photograph 160 Anxieties and Ambiguities 171 Conclusion 176 Postscript 182 Bibliography 197 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Gould’s “Backcloth”, from The Slow Plague. 14 Figure 2: An Example of Gould’s Cartography - the Bronx AIDS “death surface”, from The Slow Plague. 16 Figure 3: Gould’s Textual Visualisation of HIV and AIDS, from The Slow Plague. 17 Figure 4: Photograph of “Kasensero, on the shores of Lake Victoria, where some of the earliest recorded cases of AIDS occurred” taken by Ed Hooper. 64 Figure 5: “Map of East Africa, showing the main trucking routes”, from Slim. 78 Figure 6: “Map of Rakai District, southern Uganda”, from Slim. 79 V Introduction Aside from its harsh physicality, AIDS is a nexus of meaning and discourse. Particular notions of sex, race, gender, religion, medicine, science, the social, nature and culture are called upon and reinforced or re-negotiated whenever AIDS is talked about. When one writes authoritatively about AIDS, a deep responsibility is shouldered. Meanings, beliefs, attitudes, ideas and actions flow from the text - writing within this nexus can have a very real, material effect on bodies. The sweep of a powerful pen may lead directly to mental and physical pain, or it may offer succour, hope or an easing of suffering. Hall was not overstating his case when he declared “textuality as site of life or death” since the manner in which one talks, writes, and represents in relation to AIDS can be exactly this.1 Here I examine three sets of popular and potentially very powerful representations constructed within this frighteningly significant discursive nexus. Peter Gould’s popularly-oriented book The Slow Plague is, arguably, Geography’s most significant entry to date into the discourse on AIDS and I analyse his work in detail in Chapter One, focussing initially on a critique of Gould’s concept of science; then interrogating the explicitly spatial, visual and scientific geography that Gould aims to situate within the AIDS research paradigm. I then turn from an analysis of Geography’s dominant response to AIDS to a specific and monolithic popular geography worked out within this nexus, ‘AIDS in Africa’, as chronicled by the media, specifically the ‘quality press’, in Britain and North America. Slim: A Reporter’s Own Story of AiDS in East Africa forms a key part of this popular discourse. It was written by Ed Hooper, a journalist and photographer for the BBC and The Guardian, who produced several of the early ‘AIDS in Africa’ Western media stories and also several photographs of Ugandan people with AIDS which were syndicated widely in Britain and North America. Slim is a literary journalistic account of Flooper’s time in Uganda reporting AIDS. It therefore both describes the 1 Hall, S. 1992: “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies” in Grossberg, L., Nelson, C. and Treichier, P. (eds.), Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge), p.285. 1 mechanics of construction of the ‘AIDS in Africa’ media discourse and feeds into this self-same discourse as a piece of popular representation itself. So, in Chapter Two I aim to examine, first, the literary construction of representations of ‘AIDS in Africa’- attempting to unravel the intertwining rhetorics of objectivity and empire within which the story is predominantly couched. And, secondly, I examine the literal construction of this discourse, since Slim reveals for analysis the asymmetries of power and disproportionate economies of capital, access, sight and production that underpin and enable the ‘AIDS in Africa’ media narrative. These asymmetries and diseconomies normally lie hidden behind the journalistic rhetoric of objectivity and passivity but they form a crucial part of the actuality of the situation from which these representations emerge. A considerable amount of meaning is added to the media representations when considered within the context revealed by Slim. Therefore, having examined this context, in Chapter Three I turn to the media representations themselves, considering, initially, the frantic and frightening discursive moment in the late 1980s to which Slim provides the backdrop. This period of time saw ‘AIDS in Africa’ first reported in the Western press and, I believe, established a dominant tone and framework within which the story was relayed and understood, a framework of understanding still in use today. This framework both encodes and legitimates a series of polymorphous collusions between racism and sexism and draws upon and reinforces a particularly distinctive geographical imaginary: the story seems to take place in an aestheticised and isolated essentially colonial, chaotic, woeful and disease-ridden ‘Africa’ , and this, of course, has many detrimental repercussions for those so represented. I conclude, by way of a postscript, by examining the first signs of fracture in this monolithic ‘AIDS in Africa’ media discourse described above. In 1993, while other news outlets continued to relay the ‘AIDS in Africa’ story within the framework of understanding established in the late 1980s, The Sunday Times of London broke ranks and began to run a series of articles suggesting that ‘AIDS in Africa’ was actually “a myth.” This new twist in the discourse obviously has equally serious implications for the represented. An analysis of this second, more recent discursive media moment also begins to reveal the alarming complexity of the political and critical representational terrain that Geography must negotiate if it is to contribute - as it can and should - to the fight 2 against AIDS.