1. Remembering wars

‘Remembering wars’ discusses how war and religion mingle and shape one another and demonstrates how religion offers to meet the need for meaning in the overwhelming catastrophe of personal and national loss that war brings. There are three interesting different situations in which religious resources have been brought to bear on the remembrance of war, and equally have been shaped by it. The first one is the depiction of martyrdom and martyrs in the commemoration of the Battle of Karbala. The second one is the use of the cross in Great War memorials, while the third one is the Ghost Dance movement

Dancing with Ghosts in ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’

This essay reads the intimacy between persons and things dramatized in Keats’s poem as a haunting that at once enacts and acts against normative states of being or orders of experience. Drawing on Hazlitt’s invocation of the past as “alive and stirring with objects” in conjunction with the political resonance of the ghost dance Gayatri Spivak summons in her response to Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, this reading aims to depathologize Isabella’s intense attachment to the pot of basil by reflecting on the potential for resistance or transformation within the practices of everyday life, including within the repetitions and returns that constitute our own everyday practices as readers of Keats’s poem.

‘An endless procession of catastrophes’: Reading the War on Terror in Contemporary HIV Life Writing

This paper examines the shifting paradigms of language used in HIV/AIDS life writing. As a testimonial genre, military metaphors have played a crucial role in mobilising communities and revealing how discourses around chronic illness inscribe themselves on the body. Through a textual analysis of three memoirs, Douglas Wright's Ghost Dance (2004) and Terra Incognito (2006), and David Caron's The Nearness of Others (2014), I argue that these texts represent a shift that instead engage metaphors of terrorism and security to convey meaning of lived experience and negotiate the precariousness of ongoing survival. Simultaneously, Wright and Caron maintain their health through protease inhibitors and reflect on the national anxieties produced by the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States of America. Both writers draw on the language of terrorism, especially the images taken from the Abu Ghraib prison, to inform their own experiences as HIV-positive white, middle-upper class, gay men. The significance of these metaphors can be found in their individual struggles with depression. What this paper contributes to is an understanding of what it means to think about HIV after the pharmaceutical turn when HIV is no longer considered a death sentence in the Western world, how discourses of terror inform public and personal understandings of chronic illness and mental health, and how embodied experience informs autobiographical modes of expression, and vice versa.