A collaborative creation unlike any other, the Names Project Foundation’s AIDS Memorial Quilt has played an invaluable role in shattering the silence and stigma that surrounded the epidemic in the first years of its existence. Designed by Cleve Jones, the AIDS Quilt is the largest ongoing community arts project in the world. Since its conception in 1987, the Quilt has transformed the cultural and political responses to AIDS in the U.S. Representative of both marginalized and mainstream peoples, the Quilt contains crucial material and symbolic implications for mourning the dead, and the treatment and prevention of AIDS. However, the project has raised numerous questions concerning memory, activism, identity, ownership, and nationalism, as well as issues of sexuality, race, class, and gender. As thought-provoking as the Quilt itself, this diverse collection of essays by ten prominent rhetorical scholars provides a rich experience of the AIDS Quilt, incorporating a variety of perspectives, critiques, and interpretations.
ContentsAcknowledgmentsPrologue | Cleve JonesThe Mourning After | Charles E. Morris IIIPart 1: EmergenceThe AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary Culture of Public Commemoration | Carole Blair and Neil MichelThe Politics of Loss and Its Remains in Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt | Gust A. YepPart 2: MovementQ.U.I.L.T.: A Patchwork of Reflections | Kevin Michael DeLuca, Christine Harold, and Kenneth RufoCollage/Montage as Critical Practice, Or How to “Quilt”/ReadPostmodern Text(ile)s | Brian L. Ott, Eric Aoki, and Greg DickinsonA Stitch in Time: Public Emotionality and the Repertoire of Citizenship | Jeffrey A. BennettFrom San Francisco to Atlanta and Back Again: Ideologies of Mobility in the AIDS Quilt’s Search for a Homeland |Daniel C. BrouwerPart 3: TransformationRhetorics of Loss and Living: Adding New Panels to the AIDS Quilt as an Act of Eulogy | Bryant Keith AlexanderRepeated Remembrance: Commemorating the AIDS Quilt and Resuscitating the Mourned Subject | Erin J. RandHow to Have History in an Epidemic | Kyra PearsonExperiencing the Quilt | Charles E. Morris IIIContributors
