Impossible Mourning argues that while the HIV/AIDS epidemic has occupied an important place in public discourse in South Africa over the last ten years, particularly in debates about governance and constitutional rights post-apartheid, the experiences of people living with HIV for the most part remain invisible and the multiple losses due to AIDS have gone publicly unmourned. This profound fact is at the centre of this book which explores the significance of the disavowal of AIDS-death in relation to violence, death, and mourning under apartheid. Impossible Mourning shows how, in spite of the magnitude of the epidemic, and as a result of the stigma and discrimination that have largely characterized both national and personal responses to the epidemic, spaces for the expression of collective mourning have been few.