Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS

Marika Cifor

Feb 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Kate Udall

About this audiobook

Serving as a vital supplement to the existing scholarship on AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s, Viral Cultures is the first book to critically examine the archives that have helped preserve and create the legacy of those radical activities. Marika Cifor charts the efforts activists, archivists, and curators have made to document the work of AIDS activism in the United States and the infrastructure developed to maintain it, safeguarding the material for future generations to remember these social movements and to revitalize the epidemic's past in order to remake the present and future of AIDS. Drawing on large institutional archives such as the New York Public Library, as well as those developed by small, community-based organizations, this work of archival ethnography details how contemporary activists, artists, and curators use these records to build on the cultural legacy of AIDS activism to challenge the conditions of injustice that continue to undergird current AIDS crises. Cifor analyzes the various power structures through which these archives are mediated, demonstrating how ideology shapes the nature of archival material and how it is accessed and used. Positioning vital nostalgia as both a critical faculty and a generative practice, this book explores the act of saving this activist past and reanimating it in the digital age.

About the author

Marika Cifor is assistant professor in the Information School and adjunct faculty member in gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Washington.

Kate Udall's evocative narrative style has been recognized with two AudioFile Earphones Awards and an Audie nomination. An Audible Approved Producer, she has recorded over 142 audiobooks for publishers including Harper, Doubleday, Tantor, Macmillan, and Brilliance.