Review of Claire Laurier Decoteau, Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Before South Africa became famous for implementing the largest public sector antiretroviral (ARV) treatment program in the world, it was infamous for the Mbeki government's refusal to recognize the efficacy, safety and sustainability of ARVs and his administration's endorsement of "vitamins and vegetables" as efficacious HIV/AIDS treatments (Cullinan & Thom 2009).The activism required to bring about this policy transformation has been extensively documented by treatment activists themselves (Geffen 2010), and by academics who have sought to explain how these struggles have reconfigured the contours of postapartheid citizenship (Robins 2010), social rights and intellectual property rights law (Pieterse 2014, Kapstein & Busby 2013), transnational activism for access to essential medicines (Mbali 2013), and the political and economic feasibility of providing free ARVs to all who need them (Nattrass 2004).Unlike much of this literature, Claire Laurier Decoteau's Ancestors and Antiretrovirals is not primarily concerned with explaining why treatment activists were successful in popularizing the principle of universal access to ARV treatment, nor with exploring the effects of this victory on political and legal institutions.Instead, she analyzes debates about HIV/AIDS treatment in order to (1) identify and critically evaluate the conflicting strategies politicians, treatment activists and HIV-positive informal settlement dwellers propose for managing the "postcolonial

Abstract licence: CC BY

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