ABSTRACT

For over 150 years, Hart Island in New York City has been a burial ground for the city’s indigent and “unclaimed,” over a million dead who because of race, immigration, poverty, and disease were buried in obscurity. For decades, the activist organization Hart Island Project (HIP) has labored to find the names and locate the bodies of those buried there, to destigmatize the island, and to memorialize the interred. More recently, HIP launched its “AIDS Initiative.” Focusing on this initiative, we query: what specific modalities of remembering does the AIDS Initiative cultivate? And, given the crisis of the whitening of AIDS public memory, what are the initiative’s capacities for interrogating and decentering whiteness? Amidst an abundant set of its activist practices and memory artifacts, we focus our analysis on the initiative’s haunting artistic video, “Loneliness in a Beautiful Place,” its five-part storytelling webseries, and its Traveling Cloud Museum. Performing indigent rhetorical criticism, we engage the problem of the “whitewashing” of AIDS remembering, interrogate who counts as a grievable AIDS subject, and practice historical and historicized frames of interpreting and remembering.

摘要

150多年来，纽约市的哈特岛一直是该市贫民区和“无人认领”的墓地，超过一百万的人因种族，移民，贫困和疾病而被掩盖在默默无闻中。几十年来，激进组织哈特岛计划（HIP）一直在努力寻找名字并找到埋葬在此的人的尸体，以贬低该岛，并纪念被埋葬的人。最近，HIP发起了“艾滋病行动”。围绕这一倡议，我们提出以下疑问：“艾滋病倡议”培养了哪些特定的记忆方式？而且，鉴于艾滋病公众记忆白化的危机，该倡议对白度进行质疑和降低偏心性的能力是什么？在众多激进主义者的做法和记忆产物中，我们将分析的重点放在该计划令人难以忘怀的艺术视频“美丽的地方的寂寞”，由五部分组成的讲故事网络系列以及其旅行云博物馆。通过进行激烈的口头批评，我们解决了艾滋病记忆的“粉饰”问题，审问了被认为是令人痛苦的艾滋病学科的人，并实践了历史和历史性的解释和记忆框架。