ABSTRACT

Current AIDS-control efforts have invented a heterosexual “African AIDS” that promotes a new kind of colonial domination by reconstructing Africa as an uncharted, supranational mass. Whatever the overt concerns of international health workers for containing AIDS in (within?) the continent, their construal of “Africa” as the margin of economic/cultural “development” and as the “heart” of the AIDS epidemic helps to stabilize a Euro-America adrift in a postmodern condition of lost metanarratives and occluded origins. As a totalizing grand history of nations has given way to a transcendent account of chance intersec­ tions of germs and bodies, the map of the postcolonial world has now been redrawn as a graph of epidemiologic strike rates. Because international AIDS policy has discouraged or overlooked serious attempts to prevent HIV transmis­ sion through health education, community organizing, and improved bloodbank­ ing, this new Africa-with-no-borders functions as a giant agar plate, etched by the “natural history” of the AIDS epidemic.1