Introduction: Nostalgia as Proof of Life: A Dossier on Marika Cifor's Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS

Our [the authors] inspiration for a dossier on Marika Cifor's "Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS" (2022) came from mutually experiencing the book as liberatory. As editors of this dossier who are also archival scholars of late 20th century queer life, we experienced this book as an opening. In Cifor's hands, nostalgia is political: a way of drawing out modes of critique from AIDS responses in the past in service of naming and responding to the structural harms of HIV in the present. Our early scholarly experiences of nostalgia as an epistemology landed us in this structure of feeling. We knew we weren't supposed to touch nostalgia because it felt like a weakness or turn away from serious critique–and we didn't exactly know why. Nostalgia had the structure of something like a "dirty" or deviant secret. Just like queerness. Just like HIV.