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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.
KEYWORDS:
Notes
1 Pose, season two, episode one, “Acting Up,” directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton, written by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Steven Canals, aired June 11, 2019, on FX.
2 This Pose episode practices several forms of narrative license: the Department of Correction did not regularly conduct ferry rides to Hart Island for the general public until 2012; only the first group of people who died of AIDS and were buried in 1985 were quarantined; and there was not, in 1990 or in 2019, a grove of heart-shaped rocks.
3 The large number of COVID-19 burials on Hart Island in 2020 raised considerable local (New York City) and national knowledge of its function as a public cemetery.
4 “AIDS Initiative,” The Hart Island Project, https://www.hartisland.net/aids_initiative (accessed May 31, 2020).
5 Alisa Solomon, “What Does It Mean to Remember AIDS?,” Nation, November 30, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/what-does-it-mean-to-remember-aids/.
6 See Laura Moon, “When it Comes to Handling an Outbreak, Reagan Was Bad, but Trump May be Worse,” Plus, March 12, 2020, https://www.hivplusmag.com/opinion/2020/3/12/what-early-aids-epidemic-can-teach-us-about-covid-19. Citing the Moon article, Chávez additionally alerts us to xenophobic and anti-immigrant precedents from the AIDS epidemic characterizing U.S. responses to COVID-19: Karma R. Chávez, “From AIDS to COVID-19: How History Has Paved the Way for the U.S. Response to Pandemics,” The Copper Courier, last modified April 15, 2020, https://coppercourier.com/story/from-aids-to-covid-19-how-history-has-paved-the-way-for-the-u-s-response-to-pandemics. See also Karma R. Chávez, “ACT UP, Haitian Migrants, and Alternative Memories of HIV/AIDS,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012): 63–8, doi:10.1080/00335630.2011.638659.
7 Quoted in Brandon Tensley, “Lessons the AIDS Epidemic has for Coronavirus,” CNN Politics, April 5, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/05/politics/coronavirus-aids-hiv-sarah-schulman/index.html.
8 Nishant Shahani, “How to Survive the Whitewashing of AIDS: Global Pasts, Transnational Futures,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 3, no. 1 (2016): 4, doi:10.14321/qed.3.1.0001. Shahani’s diagnosis of whitewashing focuses on the ways that particular AIDS memory texts “flatten the complex legacy of intersectional and transnational labor across coalitional lines.” Shahani, 1.
9 Robb Hernández, Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 36.
10 Racial Justice Framework Group, “A Declaration of Liberation: Building a Racially Just and Strategic Domestic HIV Movement,” November 9, 2017, https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/13f2c1_e410e116a15044d4a76a95899f670213.pdf, 6.
11 Racial Justice Framework Group, “A Declaration of Liberation,” 7.
12 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 5, doi:10.1080/15358593.2016.1183871.
13 Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization,” 16–17.
14 Lisa A. Flores, “Towards an Insistent and Transformative Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 354, 352, doi:10.1080/14791420.2018.1526387.
15 “Pauper's Grave,” Collins English Dictionary, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/paupers-grave (accessed June 15, 2020).
16 “Potter’s Field,” Dictionary.com, https://www.dictionary.com/ (accessed June 15, 2020).
17 Kent A. Ono, “Critical/Cultural Approaches to Communication,” in 21st Century Communication: A Reference Handbook, ed. William F. Eadie (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2009), 74, doi:10.4135/9781412964005.
18 In addition to works by Chávez, Hernández, Schulman, Shahani, Solomon, and the Racial Justice Framework Group already cited, these key works include: Jonathan Bell et al., “Interchange: HIV/AIDS and US History,” The Journal of American History 104, no. 2 (2017): 431–60, doi:10.1093/jahist/jax176; J. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Evelynn Hammonds, “Race, Sex, AIDS: The Construction of ‘Other,’” Radical America 20, no. 6 (1987): 28–36; José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, “Gay Latino Histories/Dying to be Remembered: AIDS Obituaries, Public Memory, and the Queer Latino Archive,” in Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America, ed. Gina M. Pérez, Frank A. Guridy, and Adrian Burgos, Jr. (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 103–28; Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Dagmawi Woubshet, The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
19 See, for example, Whitney Gent, “When Homelessness Becomes a ‘Luxury’: Neutrality as an Obstacle to Counterpublic Rights Claims,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 3 (2017): 230–50, doi:10.1080/00335630.2017.1321133; Melanie Loehwing, “Homelessness as the Unforgiving Minute of the Present: The Rhetorical Tenses of Democratic Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96, no. 4 (2010): 380–403, doi:10.1080/00335630.2010.521171; Robert Asen, Visions of Poverty: Welfare Policy and Political Imagination (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2002); Rosalee A. Clawson and Elizabeth R. Kegler, “The ‘Race Coding’ of Poverty in American Government Textbooks,” The Howard Journal of Communications 11, no. 3 (2000): 179–88, doi:10.1080/10646170050086312; Dana L. Cloud, “The Rhetoric of <Family Values>: Scapegoating, Utopia, and the Privatization of Social Responsibility,” Western Journal of Communication 62, no. 4 (1998): 387–419, doi:10.1080/10570319809374617.
20 See Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015); Ruth Osorio, “Embodying Truth: Sylvia Rivera’s Delivery of Parrhesia at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally,” Rhetoric Review 36, no. 2 (2017): 151–63, doi:10.1080/07350198.2017.1282224; Mary E. Triece, ‘“Saying It the Way We Have Lived It’: Pragmatics and the ‘Impossible Position’ of Ideology Critique,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 434–9, doi:10.1080/10570314.2011.588901; Michael K. Middleton, “'SafeGround Sacramento’ and Rhetorics of Substantive Citizenship,” Western Journal of Communication 78, no. 2 (2014): 119–33, doi:10.1080/10570314.2013.835064; J. Louis Campbell III, “‘All Men Are Created Equal’: Waiting for Godot in the Culture of Inequality,” Communication Monographs 55, no. 2 (1988): 143–61, doi:10.1080/03637758809376163; Maegan Parker Brooks, A Voice That Could Stir an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2014); Matthew S. May, Soapbox Rebellion: The Hobo Orator Union and the Free Speech Fights of the Industrial Workers of the World, 1909–1916 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2013); Casey Ryan Kelly, “‘We Are Not Free’: The Meaning of <Freedom> in American Indian Resistance to President Johnson’s War on Poverty,” Communication Quarterly 62, no. 4 (2014): 455–73, doi:10.1080/01463373.2014.922486.
21 In this journal, forum editor Darrel Wanzer-Serrano and contributors interrogate “race, racism, and antiracism in rhetorical studies”: see Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, “Rhetoric’s Rac(e/ist) Problems,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 468, doi:10.1080/00335630.2019.1669068. Additionally, see contributions to “The Race and Rhetoric” forum in volume 15, no. 4 of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies in 2018.
22 Triece, ‘“Saying It the Way We Have Lived It,’” 437.
23 See Charles E. Morris III, “(Self-)Portrait of Prof. R.C.: A Retrospective,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 1 (2010): 4–42, doi:10.1080/10570310903463760.
24 Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, “What is Intersectionality?,” in Intersectionality (New York, NY: Polity Press, 2016), 28, https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1362329&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
25 Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1999); Adam M. Geary, Antiblack Racism and the AIDS Epidemic: State Intimacies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
26 “Being there” was one of our methodological-axiological commitments. Together, we visited the “general public” gazebo area of Hart Island by ferry in June 2019. Further, we were able to attend HIP's yearly public meeting in person that same month. Between April and June 2020, both co-authors attended biweekly online meetings hosted by Melinda Hunt serially focusing on each of the five entries in the AIDS Initiative storytelling webseries.
27 The rhetorical framing of “unclaimed” is common in HIP materials (e.g., “unclaimed and unidentified New Yorkers”), and it generates abundant pathos. Hunt clarifies:
Unclaimed simply means that a family did not hire a private funeral director. It doesn’t mean the person was unwanted. It doesn’t even mean that the person, the family, was impoverished. It just means that they didn’t, for whatever reason, hire a private funeral director.
28 Daniel A. Gross, “The Transformation of Hart Island,” New Yorker, April 10, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/the-transformation-of-hart-island?source=search_google_dsa_paid&gclid=Cj0KCQiArvX_BRCyARIsAKsnTxOWidMHtEXefJaDgR5mzTF7I4YiRIgzo4MIlZtaRlEMh3Cb1duyrMYaAt8nEALw_wcB.
29 Tiara R. Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas and Challenging Militarization from ‘A Stirring Place’,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 7, doi:10.1080/14791420.2019.1572905. In this vein, a decolonial analysis of Hart Island might “examine how the convergence of water/land/islands—understood from and by Indigenous peoples—contributes to existing conversations about mapping in rhetorical studies.” Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric,” 6.
30 Quoted in One Million American Dreams, directed by Brendan J. Byrne (Belfast, UK: Fine Point Films, 2018), film, 1:21 and 1:23.
31 Anne Cronin, “The Ghosts of Graveyards,” New York Times, May 23, 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/23/nyregion/the-ghosts-of-graveyards.html.
32 Margaret F. O’Connell, “Potter's Field Has Found a Resting Place at Last,” New York Times, August 31, 1975, https://www.nytimes.com/1975/08/31/archives/potters-field-has-found-a-resting-place-at-last-a-resting-place-for.html.
33 This rhetorical framing appears in Loneliness in a Beautiful Place, directed by Melinda Hunt (New York, NY: The Hart Island Project, 2019), digital film: “Traveling Cloud Museum is a collection of stories about people who disappeared in New York City,” 8:04.
34 “Potter's Field and Cremation,” New York Times, July 18, 1915, 14. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
35 Melinda Hunt, “The Nature of Hart Island,” in Hart Island, ed. Melinda Hunt and Joel Sternfeld (New York: Scalo, 1998), 20.
36 Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1890), 177–8.
37 Quoted in One Million American Dreams, 1:01.
38 Fred Ferretti, “About New York: Last Ride to Harts [sic] Island,” New York Times, August 14, 1974, 30.
39 Nina Bernstein, “Unearthing the Secrets of New York's Mass Graves,” New York Times, May 15, 2016. Appearing in this quotation and quotations elsewhere in this essay, “inmate” should be marked as a subject position constituted by carceral practices and structures. On languaging, see Michelle Alexander, “Preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition,” in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th anniv. ed. (New York: The New Press, 2020), xviii–xix.
40 Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 33.
41 For this history of Hart Island's many purposes for the living, see Hunt, “The Nature of Hart Island.”
42 Quoted in One Million American Dreams, 33:50.
43 See, for example, “In Potter’s Field: Burying the City’s Pauper Dead,” New York Times, March 3, 1878, 2, https://www.nytimes.com/1878/03/03/archives/in-the-potters-field-burying-the-citys-pauper-dead-the-voyage-of.html; Douglas Martin, “A Heavy Burden: Burying Eileen, Sam, Liz and F/C,” New York Times, B1, March 28, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/28/nyregion/about-new-york-a-heavy-burden-burying-eileen-sam-liz-and-f-c.html; Francis X. Clines, “The Prison, the Quick and the Dead,” New York Times, July 24, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/24/nyregion/on-sunday-the-prison-the-quick-and-the-dead.html.
44 Steven Lee Myers, “Politics of Present Snags Remembrance of Past: Plan for Potter's Field Memorial Near African Burial Ground Stalls in Emotional Debate,” New York Times, July 20, 1993, B1, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/20/nyregion/politics-present-snags-remembrance-past-plan-for-potter-s-field-memorial-near.html.
45 Myers, “Politics of Present.”
46 Quoted in One Million American Dreams, 25:06.
47 Quoted in AIDS Burials on Hart Island Webseries, “You Won’t Be Forgotten,” directed by Melinda Hunt (New York: The Hart Island Project, 2020), digital film, 5:20. Openly gay and HIV+ New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, a strong advocate for Hart Island memory liberation, observed that people “feel as though they are visiting a prison when they are going to the island.” Corey Johnson, “Hart Island Becoming NYC Parks Property,” November 1, 2019, 1:14, https://council.nyc.gov/news/2019/11/18/hart-island-becoming-nyc-parks-property/.
48 Kristen Martin, “Abolishing the Prison of the Dead,” Baffler 48 (November 2019): https://thebaffler.com/salvos/abolishing-the-prison-of-the-dead-martin.
49 Chasing News, “A Rare Tour of Hart Island, NYC’s Isle of Lost Souls: Part 2,” YouTube.com, May 3, 2017, 3:12, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLamATLFBAc.
50 Stacy Szymaszek, Hart Island (New York: Nightboat Books, 2015), 4.
51 Corey Kilgannon, “Dead of AIDS and Forgotten in Potter’s Field,” New York Times, July 3, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/nyregion/hart-island-aids-new-york.html.
52 Kilgannon, “Dead of AIDS.”
53 Kilgannon, “Dead of AIDS.”
54 We would include in the domain of Geary's critique the conditions of possibility for epidemic remembrance and mnemonicide. Geary, Antiblack Racism and the AIDS Epidemic, 3. On mnemonicide, see Charles E. Morris III, “Hard Evidence: The Vexations of Lincoln's Queer Corpus,” in Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 185–214.
55 Hammonds, “Race, Sex, AIDS,” 30.
56 Quoted in Woubshet, The Calendar of Loss, 145.
57 Loneliness.
58 Eli B. Mangold and Charles Goehring, “The Visual Rhetoric of the Aerial View: From Surveillance to Resistance,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 1 (2019): 25, doi:10.1080/00335630.2018.1553305.
59 Loneliness.
60 Because the primary way that HIP finds those buried on Hart Island is through official city death certificates, names assigned at birth that have not been legally changed are the names that populate the HIP website. For some trans and non-binary identified people, like Rachel Humphreys, those names are deadnames. Recognizing this challenge to finding the AIDS dead, HIP altered its website entry for Humphreys to include “Other [name]” alongside “Name [legal/official first name]” and “Last Name”; the website extended this “Other [name]” affordance to all people the project has identified.
61 Mangold and Goehring, “The Visual Rhetoric of the Aerial View,” 31.
62 Mangold and Goehring, “The Visual Rhetoric of the Aerial View,” 34.
63 Filmmaker Zach Taylor's footage of COVID-19 burials combines with Micah Hauser's story to produce a view from above. See Micah Hauser, “An Aerial View of New York City's Pandemic,” New Yorker, May 14, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/news/video-dept/an-aerial-view-of-new-york-citys-pandemic?utm_campaign=Hart%20Island&utm_term=watch%20video&utm_medium=email&utm_source=directmailmac.
64 Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 221–73. Like many institutions, prisons practice binary sex differentiation and separation, producing the ostensibly cissexual “men” referenced here regardless of the incarcerated person’s identifications.
65 13th, directed by Ava DuVerney (Sherman Oaks, CA: Kandoo Films, 2016), film.
66 Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 159.
67 Bost in Bell et al., “Interchange: HIV/AIDS and US History,” 436.
68 Ramírez, “Gay Latino Histories/Dying to be Remembered,” 121.
69 Sturken, Tangled Memories, 209.
70 That the series features family members in the form of bio-genetic kin is more serendipitous outcome than deliberate plan. Hunt extended invitations to people who, via the HIP website, had declared their deceased to have died of AIDS-related causes. From among those who accepted the invitation, Hunt produced videos in which her artistic vision for the series and the storyteller’s clarity of narrative and clarity of purpose coalesced. Personal communication with Melinda Hunt, July 27, 2020.
71 Our indeterminate phrasing here is intentional. We follow Flores’ heed that “the very production of race … [is] rhetorical.” Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization,” 5. None of the living storytellers explicate their racial and ethnic self-identifications in their videos, nor do they explicate such identifications about their deceased family members. Instead, such identifications are expressed (imperfectly) through: in three cases, carrying surnames recognizable as Latinx; in three cases, making references to the deceased's residence in or relationship to Puerto Rico; in one case, making reference to the African-American funeral tradition of “home-going service.” The category of Latinx is itself an ethnic category in “constant processes of change and contestation” about which Soto Vega and Chávez warn scholars to be “cautious in their discussion of racial positions.” See Karrieann Soto Vega and Karma R. Chávez, “Latinx Rhetoric and Intersectionality in Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 319, 324, doi:10.1080/14791420.2018.1533642.
72 Hernández, Archiving an Epidemic, 11.
73 AIDS Burials on Hart Island Webseries, “Norber[t] Soto,” directed by Melinda Hunt (New York, NY: The Hart Island Project, 2020), digital film, 10:37.
74 AIDS Burials on Hart Island Webseries, “Remembering Carmen Perez,” directed by Melinda Hunt (New York, NY: The Hart Island Project, 2020), digital film, 9:10 and 8:59. Here and throughout our analysis of the webseries videos, we follow storytellers’ choices of gender pronouns for their family members.
75 AIDS Burials on Hart Island Webseries, “You Won't Be Forgotten,” directed by Melinda Hunt (New York, NY: The Hart Island Project, 2020), digital film, 12:19.
76 AIDS Burials on Hart Island Webseries, “Everybody is Somebody,” directed by Melinda Hunt (New York, NY: The Hart Island Project, 2020), digital film, 1:29.
77 AIDS Burials, “Everybody is Somebody,” 1:09.
78 AIDS Burials, “Everybody is Somebody,” 0:40. For a brief historical account of homegoing services in Black and African-American communities, see Sara J. Marsden, “Homegoing Funerals: An African-American Funeral Tradition,” U.S. Funerals Online, March 5, 2013, https://www.us-funerals.com/funeral-articles/homegoing-funerals.html.
79 AIDS Burials, “Norber[t] Soto,” 5:04.
80 AIDS Burials, “Norber[t] Soto,” 5:19.
81 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 19–20.
82 AIDS Burials, “Remembering Carmen Perez,” 0:18.
83 Teresa Malcolm, “Creating Sacred Space,” National Catholic Reporter, November 14, 2003, 16.
84 AIDS Burials, “Remembering Carmen Perez,” 2:28.
85 Medina cited in Malcolm, “Creating Sacred Space,” 16.
86 Malcolm, “Creating Sacred Space,” 16.
87 AIDS Burials, “Remembering Carmen Perez,” 1:21 and 2:39.
88 Hernández, Archiving an Epidemic, 11.
89 Kilgannon, “Dead of AIDS.” The photo credit is to Todd Heisler and is captioned “a small heart shaped stone left as a marker on Hart Island.”
90 E.g., Muñoz, Cruising Utopia.
91 AIDS Burials on Hart Island Webseries, “Ghost Kid Beats,” directed by Melinda Hunt (New York: The Hart Island Project, 2020), digital film, 0:06.
92 AIDS Burials, “Ghost Kid Beats,” 1:00.
93 AIDS Burials, “Ghost Kid Beats,” 0:09.
94 Jennifer Brier in Bell et al., “Interchange: HIV/AIDS and US History,” 442.
95 AIDS Burials, “Everybody is Somebody,” 6:02.
96 AIDS Burials, “Everybody is Somebody,” 6:14.
97 Caitlin Bruce, “The Balaclava as Affect Generator: Free Pussy Riot Protests and Transnational Iconicity,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2015): 42–62, doi:10.1080/14791420.2014.989246.
98 Bruce, “The Balaclava as Affect Generator,” 45.
99 This number is a significant undercount of the AIDS dead buried on Hart Island. Some DOC ledgers list “AIDS” as a cause of death, but HIP largely relies upon people who knew the deceased to select a box on its website identifying that person as having died of AIDS-related causes. Enduring stigmas likely prevent the living from linking their beloved deceased to AIDS, let alone Hart Island. Personal communication with Melinda Hunt, June 27, 2020.
100 Annette Vega, April 1, 2019, comment on Traveling Cloud Museum.
101 Quoted in Woubshet, The Calendar of Loss, 58–9.
102 Woubshet, The Calendar of Loss, 58.
103 See Hart Island Project, https://www.hartisland.net/ (accessed May 31, 2020).
104 Bruce, “The Balaclava as Affect Generator,” 45.
105 Ramírez, “Gay Latino Histories/Dying to be Remembered,” 108.
106 Belinda Brecksa, March 4, 2019, comment on Traveling Cloud Museum. We have not corrected spellings in the TCM posts. We have added grammatical marks where we believe it will aid readers.
107 Anne Marie Stefanick (added by Alexis King-Casto), October 1, 2019, comment on Traveling Cloud Museum.
108 Vega.
109 Vega.
110 Wm Ruiz, February 23, 2019, comment on Traveling Cloud Museum.
111 Benny LeMaster, “Notes on Trans Relationality,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 4, no. 2 (2017): 86, doi:10.14321/qed.4.2.0084.
112 Here we invoke Warner's account of “stranger-relationality.” See Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2002), 75.
113 On material disparities and structural racisms and violences, see Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness; Geary, Antiblack Racism and the AIDS Epidemic.
114 Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” in Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 129–49.
115 This episode was Martha Wade’s first point of encounter with Hart Island. In her storytelling video, she proclaims “that’s how I found out … : I had never heard of Hart Island until Pose.” AIDS Burials, “Everybody is Somebody,” 4:45.
116 Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 103.
117 Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr, Who Are the Stewards of the AIDS Archive? (New York: CUNY Academic Works, 2018), https://academicworks.cuny.edu/bc_pubs/201.
118 Theodore Kerr, “The AIDS Crisis Revisitation,” Lambda Literary (January 4, 2018), https://www.lambdaliterary.org/2018/01/the-aids-crisis-revisitation/?hilite=%27Kerr%27.
119 Flores, “Towards an Insistent and Transformative,” 352. “Not just inclusion,” Flores warns: “But never not inclusion.” Flores, 352.
120 Holland, Raising the Dead, 179. Holland affirms “Embracing the subjectivity of death allows marginalized peoples to speak about the unspoken—to name the places within and without their cultural milieu where … they have slipped between the cracks of language … .” Her monograph explores “what is at stake when the critic ventures into conversations at the boundaries of worlds, what Taussig has described as the ‘space of death.’” Holland, 4–5. See also Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr., “The Queerness of Blackness,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2, no. 2 (2015): 173–6.
121 Asen, Visions of Poverty.
122 See Pascal Emmer, “Talkin’ ‘Bout Meta Generation: ACT UP History and Queer Futurity,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (February 2012): 89–96, doi:10.1080/00335630.2011.638664.
123 Emily K. Hobson observes, “Thinking pedagogically, a course on the history of HIV/AIDS affirms activists’ contention that HIV/AIDS opens a lens onto the structural inequalities of society.” See Hobson in Bell et al., “Interchange: HIV/AIDS and US History,” 444. We are also thinking of Brim’s pathbreaking Poor Queer Studies, which
locates the pedagogical convergence of Queer Studies with my students’ socioeconomic as well as socioaffective “histories of arrival” … .Though my pedagogical refrain … is queerness, the bass notes for my Queer Studies pedagogy at CUNY are racialized and gendered socioeconomic, material, and psychic realities through which reverberate that freighted meter of class status, “poor.”
124 See Kendall R. Phillips and G. Mitchell Reyes, Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2011); Matthew Houdek, “The Rhetorical Force of ‘Global Archival Memory’: (Re)Situating Archives Along the Global Memoryscape,” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 9, no. 3 (2016): 204–21, doi:10.1080/17513057.2016.1195006.
125 Daniel E. Slotnik, “Up to a Tenth of New York City's Coronavirus Dead May Be Buried in a Potter's Field,” New York Times, March 25, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/nyregion/hart-island-mass-graves-coronavirus.html; see also Jody Rosen, “How COVID-19 Has Forced Us to Look at the Unthinkable,” New York Times, April 29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/29/magazine/covid-hart-island.html.
126 Our conception of memory’s gentrification is shaped by Schulman’s analysis of AIDS memory. Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Daniel C. Brouwer
Daniel C. Brouwer is Associate Professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University.
Charles E. Morris III
Charles E. Morris III is Professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University and Co-Founding Editor of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking.
For their particular forms of impact at various stages of this project, we are grateful to Andrew Spieldenner, Kelsey Abele, Ana Terminel Iberri, Tyler Rife, Katrina N. Hanna, Robert Asen, E Cram, Michael Tristano, Jr., Benny LeMaster, Kendall Phillips, Melinda Hunt, editor Karrin Vasby Anderson, and the manuscript reviewers. We are grateful, too, for the queer intimacies cultivated with each other through this collaboration, our first. Chuck dedicates his work on this project to his husband, Scott Rose (1970–2021), who during their twenty-six years together inspired and with darling, boyish pride championed all of his scholarship, making it possible.