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Oak Park River Forest LS – Affirmative – AIDS Theater

Act One is The Plague: In 1947 Albert Camus’s novel The Plague describes the extraordinary events in the ordinary African town of Oran. In this account, Camus showed how individuals should react to the absurdity of life, represented by a disease that killed randomly and indiscriminately. The novel proves that the reaffirmation of hope is the best action to take when faced with almost certain death. We bring you to the moment Oran is diagnosed with the plague. Camus 1947 (Albert, “Not an Existentialist”, The Plague)

The word "plague" had just been uttered for the first time… If not, one would know it anyhow for what it was and what steps should be taken for coping with and finally overcoming it. X

And SHUT go the gates of Oran without warning—the town becomes an island, isolated from the rest of the world, separating the diseased townspeople from their own family. Camus 1947 (Albert, “Not an Existentialist”, The Plague)

From now on, it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us. Hitherto, surprised as he may have been by the strange things happening around him, each individual citizen had gone about his business as usual, so far as this was possible… And in the long run, to these sterile, reiterated monologues, these futile colloquies with a blank wall, even the banal formulas of a telegram came to seem preferable. X

Act Two is AIDS Current AIDS discourse securitizes and individuates the disease along homophobic and racist lines, creating an ethic of exclusion. Our reading of The Plague is a demand for community in the arena of AIDS which counteracts the exclusionary logic of contemporary AIDS discourse by fostering a compassionate politics that realizes a community of difference. Gomel 2000 (Elana, Lecturer in the Department of English at Tel Aviv University, “The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body,” Twentieth Century Literature 46, 4, jstor)

But can such a body be an object of a (political) desire? Can the entropia of communal dying, inexorably dwindling toward the lone figure of the last man, be recast as utopia?… But those who-perhaps understandably-seek a consolation in entropia should consider whether it does not skirt perilously close to genocidal utopia.

Act Three is the Theatre Community theatre is dying out in Africa – more funding is needed Johansson 2007 (Ola, Lecturer in Radical Theatre and Performance Analysis at Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts “The Lives and Deaths of Zakia: How AIDS Changed African Community Theatre and Vice Versa” Theatre Research International 32, p. 85-100)

Some groups have simply given up; on my random revisits, villagers confirm to me that they have not taken part in theatre events for a long time, which usually indicates a general absence of prevention activities… Soon, if they continue to be ignored and disrespected, the alienated youth will not tell us the truth any more but only mock us with a grinning death mask

AIDS theater creates community formed around the prevention of AIDS Johansson 2007 (Ola, Lecturer in Radical Theatre and Performance Analysis at Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts “The Lives and Deaths of Zakia: How AIDS Changed African Community Theatre and Vice Versa” Theatre Research International 32, p. 85-100)

The development of community theatre spread across Africa via international workshops and eventually led to a third phase of community theatre, elaborated in countries such as Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Tanzania.31 At this point most of the creative and edifying modus operandi was entrusted the community subjects themselves, who participated directly in the planning and performing of the theatre. Community theatre went from being a social event to becoming a social process. … community theatre potentially is the most efficient form of HIV prevention for young people

Community theatre has the audience identify with the ill. This is the basis for a new ethical relationship with the sick, allowing us to challenge dominating discourses that portray AIDS only as a threat to those surrounding the afflicted. Goldstein 1990 (Richard, executive editor of Village Voice, “The Implicated and The Immune: Cultural Responses to AIDS,” The Milbank Quarterly, vol. 68, pg. 298-299)

But the parameters of representation do not end with the fine arts. Popular culture, too, has found itself drawn to depictions of the causes and consequences of HIV infection. … If the arts have positioned themselves with the implicated, the mass media represent the immune.

The US controls the global policy toward and the discourse surrounding AIDS – our inaction in the face of the plague has prevented a global response to it. Now, we must step forward and take up the mantle of community building that only we are capable of Behrman 2004 (Greg, coordinator for the Council on Foreign Relations Roundtable on Improving U.S. Global AIDS Policy, The Invisible People: How the U.S. has slept through the Global AIDS Pandemic, the Greatest Humanitarian Catastrophe of our Time, pg. xiii-xiv)

Throughout the rise of the AIDS pandemic, the United States has been the world's largest donor and its most vocal mouthpiece in the fight against the disease. … It has been driven by a hope that history might evince the mistakes of the past, so they need not be the mistakes of the future.

And thus we reveal our advocacy: The United States federal government should provide necessary resources for AIDS theatre companies to provide culturally sensitive education programs in parts of the topically designated areas which do not currently have access to AIDS theatre.

Act Four is Community: The Struggle is the Cure Recognizing that the plague affects everyone must move us all to fight. Even at the peril of certain death, we cannot permit inaction. Instead, we must fight the plague in order to save as many people as possible. Camus 1947 (Albert, “Not an Existentialist”, The Plague)

Those who enrolled in the "sanitary squads," as they were called, had, indeed, no such great merit in doing as they did, since they knew it was the only thing to do, and the unthinkable thing would then have been not to have brought themselves to do it. … And to do this there was only one resource: to fight the plague. There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical. X

This fight against the plague is a never-ending defeat. Death is a durable and horrible reality—it is only in our struggle against death and our refusal to give into failure that allows us to live through the absurd. Camus 1947 (Albert, “Not an Existentialist”, The Plague)

Tarrou squared his shoulders against the back of the chair, then moved his head forward into the light. "Do you believe in God, doctor?" … "Who taught you all this, doctor?" The reply came promptly: "Suffering." X

In the face of impending death we must strengthen our resolve in the fight against hopelessness. We must all take on the responsibility of resistance – even if success is in doubt. Refusing this duty hastens our inevitable extinction. There is no escape. Camus 1947 (Albert, “Not an Existentialist”, The Plague)

But, Paneloux continued, there were other precedents of which he would now remind them. If the chronicles of the Black Death at Marseille were to be trusted, only four of the eighty-one monks in the Mercy Monastery survived the epidemic. And of these four three took to flight. … No, there was no middle course. We must accept the dilemma and choose either to hate God or to love God. And who would dare to choose to hate Him? X

The end of the plague comes at the end of the tale—its lesson is one of community. The plague’s collective absurdity illustrates our shared fate of death, and, ultimately, the possibility for collective hope. The 1AC builds the community in the face of the plague that allows us to overcome this existential hell. Camus 1947 (Albert, “Not an Existentialist”, The Plague)

For the first time Rieux found that he could give a name to the family likeness that for several months he had detected in the faces in the streets. He had only to look around him now…. , he was thinking it has no importance whether such things have or have not a meaning; all we need consider is the answer given to men's hope. X