Book Review

Impossible mourning: HIV/AIDS and visuality after apartheid

Abstract

In her book, Impossible mourning, Kylie Thomas argues that although HIV/AIDS has been established as a central public discourse in South Africa during the last decade, the experiences of people living with HIV/AIDS remain largely invisible. Moreover, the manifold losses, sorrows and deaths owing to AIDS are publicly unmourned. For Thomas (2014:9), the failure to mourn the ‘1,000 people who die of AIDS in South Africa each day’ testifies to the fact that their lives were ‘as invisible within public memory as their deaths’.