For Northern Displacements: Understanding the Meaning of Madness in Global Constructions of HIV/AIDS

This essay argues for the value of 'ex-centric' comparisons within global intellectual exchange. To privilege East-West in Northern academies to the exclusion of less apparently immediate concerns, the essay suggests, is to hinder the production of adequate historical and comparative contexts whose global scope enables proper comprehension of problems close to hand. This results in a kind of exaggerated global imaginary map, in that its ability to focus on certain geographically located concerns in detail is in precise proportion to its consequent need to distort the others not selected as worthy of such scrutiny. South Africa, the essay goes on to argue, plays a particular role in Western nations' imaginative distortions of their place within the transition from colonization and its kind of modernity to the processes of globalization: It is seen as a potential economic powerhouse that could "rescue" sub-Saharan Africa, but simultaneously as a threat to undermine to liberal democracy, a fear very much present in national and global discourses surrounding the battle against HIV-AIDS.