Description
Book SynopsisAn ethnographic account of the South African AIDS movement and activists
From the historical roots of AIDS activism in the struggle for African liberation to the everyday work of community education in Khayelitsha, Sustaining Life tells the story of how the rights-based South African AIDS movement successfully transformed public health institutions, enabled access to HIV/AIDS treatment, and sustained the lives of people living with the disease. Typical accounts of the South African epidemic have focused on the political conflict surrounding it, Theodore Powers observes, but have yet to examine the process by which the national HIV/AIDS treatment program achieved near-universal access.
In Sustaining Life, Powers demonstrates the ways in which non-state actors, from caregivers to activists, worked within the state to transform policy and state-based institutions in order to improve health-based outcomes. He shows how advocates in the South African AIDS m
Trade Review
"Sustaining Life provides an excellent introduction to anyone interested in knowing more about how South African AIDS activists—primarily those working as part of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC)—developed its political campaign for demanding access to life-saving HIV treatment for all South Africans…a very clearly and engagingly written book." * Medical Anthropology Quarterly *
"Sustaining Life provides an ethnographic and historically grounded rendering of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa that successfully led to near universal access to HIV/AIDS treatment. It is a tremendous contribution to the literature on the HIV/ AIDS crisis in Africa and it is a story that needs to be told." * James Pfeiffer, University of Washington *
Table of Contents
Preface
List of Abbreviations
Introduction. People, Pathogens, and Power: Situating the South African HIV/AIDS Epidemic
Chapter 1. Contact, Colonization, and Apartheid: South African Social Formations in Historical Perspective
Chapter 2. The Political History of South African HIV/AIDS Activism
Chapter 3. Occupying the State: HIV/AIDS Activism and the South African National AIDS Council
Chapter 4. A Policy Redirected: Transnational Donor Capital and Treatment Access in the Western Cape Province
Chapter 5. Community Health Activism, AIDS Dissidence, and Local HIV/AIDS Politics in Khayelitsha
Chapter 6. People in the State: Activism, Access, and Transformation
Afterword. After Treatment Access: An Epidemic Unresolved
Notes
References
Index
