"With Its Shadows Dominating the Brightness": Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother and the Subjects of AIDS History.

This essay reads Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother (1997), a memoir that recounts her brother Devon's AIDS-related death, in relation to both the corpus of US AIDS life writing that emerged during the so-called height of the AIDS crisis and today's ongoing practices of AIDS commemoration. Challenging the activist-centered knowledge paradigms through which the subjects of AIDS memoir largely continue to be understood, My Brother lays bare the conditions that sustain the celebratory legacy of US AIDS activism and its exemplary gay white male subject—an understanding of AIDS that brackets off what Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, and Nishant Shahani have described as the uneven distribution of AIDS crises across the world. At the same time, this essay considers the risks that attend contemporary efforts to bring into greater relief these global crises by assuming the transparency of Devon, and those similarly situated, as objects of our knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]