South African academic Neville Hoad is set to publish a new book, Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS, with the University of California Press in February 2025.

Hoad’s third book is a genre-mixing study that examines how creative works about HIV/AIDS worked with and against official policy documents. In the 1980s, HIV/AIDS became a major public health crisis in sub-Saharan Africa, attracting global attention. The experiences of those diagnosed with the virus became the subject of artistic cultural representations such as poetry, novels, and film. Pandemic Genres looks at how these cultural representations interacted with official state pronouncements, writing from African and international journalists, and informational messaging by humanitarian NGOs. Through this book, Hoad shows how historical ideas about race, colonialism, and sex in Botswana, Kenya, and South Africa shaped African and international perceptions of the pandemic.

Naminata Diabate, author of Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa, offers her praise for the book

Unavoidably interdisciplinary and unapologetically intimate, Pandemic Genres shows how creative genres offer alternate imaginaries of the HIV/AIDS pandemic while developing modes of reading public discourse to accentuate the imaginative work they enable and obstruct. These unique reflections move beyond HIV/AIDS to illuminate how to unravel the connection between genres and any pandemics.

Neville Hoad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and codirector of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at the UT School of Law.

You can preorder Pandemic Imaginaries here or download an ebook for free through University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program once it becomes available.