Clio says, history does not repeat exactly; more of a theme and variations
To an academic colleague's inaugural lecture this evening, on the very conflicting emotions that can be read in the historical record around AIDS in the mid 1980s.
It was a dark time.
But although there was a general toxicity coming from the media and from central government, a lot of popular hostility, and responses of fear, grief, mourning, anger, internalised sense of stigma: what that led to was all sorts of resistance and activism, and social changes that perhaps one would not have predicted from the perspective of being in the late 1980s.
Though, walking home, I was thinking of that cliche from one's undergraduate history about revolutions happening when things have been getting better, or at least, not when oppression is at its worst and survival is an effort -
And perhaps that ability to resist and undertake meaningful activist responses had something to do with the fact that there had been a (however partial) period of 'things getting better'.
But there was a resonance, and the lecture made it explicit. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2534773.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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