ABSTRACT
Public sphere theory, with its reliance on Habermasian notions of communicative rationality, has historically struggled both to engage and to theorize the role of affect in public life (Habermas, 1984). In recent years, feminist and queer scholars-mostly based in the United States —Lauren Berlant (2000), Ann Cvetkovich (2003) and Douglas Crimp (1989, 2002) have elaborated ideas of a “corresponding publicness to the intimate,” “public feelings,” connections between ideas and practices of mourning and militancy, respectively, to confound the public/private split seen as central to hegemonic liberal ideologies. This essay aspires to set these ideas in dialogue with recent representations-singular but perhaps representative-of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa to work out the relation between illness as a profoundly subjective, embodied experience and a public one, deeply mediated by social discourses of shame and stigma, the historical forces of racialization and the market, new forms of governmentality in relation to the ir/rationalities of public health policy, and beyond. That these representations are poems, and thus bound up with performances of formal protocols and ideas of aesthetic sublimation, adds a corresponding wrinkle to the question of what kinds of public knowledge and subjective experience they may contain. At least two significant methodological questions inhere in the move to South African poems. First, there is the hope that Public Feelings knowledge projects can travel without necessarily invoking imperial edifices of othering and that the work of scholars like Berlant, Cvetkovich
and Crimp on affect, sexuality, and intimacy could be set in dialectical relation to national contexts outside the US, and, relatedly, that historical lessons from the earlier pandemic in the North Atlantic world can be transposed without forgetting the salient differences between these times and spaces. Second, many of the major questions that the rubric of public feelings wish to address are evident in an event like the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), where narrative testimony was imagined as having emotionally reparative force in a wider project of nation-building. I turn to poetry as a way of interrupting what could be called neoliberal uses of testimony, documentary realism, and memoirs as the privileged archive for thinking about the role of affect in public life. My hope is that the poems can stand in supplementary rather than substitutive relation to these other forms and genres.
