Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Section I. Memory and Trauma1. Writing Hunger in the Nazi Ghettos: The Search for Context and the Experience of Its Absence in Leyb Goldin's 'Chronicle of a Single Day' and Oskar Rosenfeld's 'Golem and Hunger'; Sven-Erik Rose2. Thinking the Bengal Famine: Catastrophe, Geography, and the Narrative Genres; Sourit Bhattacharya3. 'A Sound Without a Message': Embodied Memory, Childhood, and the Representation of Famine in Oksana Zabushko's The Museum of Abandoned Secrets; Anastasia UlanowiczSection II. The Body and the Body Politic4. A Protest of the Poor: On the Political Meaning of the People; Sherene Seikaly5. Gendered Political Economies and the Feminization of Hunger: M.F.K. Fisher and the Cold War Culture Wars; Christina Van Houten6. Gourmand or Glutton?: Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Representations of the Corpulent in a Climate of Want; Rachael NewberrySection III. Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts7. Refusing to Represent the Great Hunger: Metaphor and the Palimpsest in Irish Film; Dana Och8. (Trans-) National Iconographies of Hunger in Cold War America; Katharina Fackler9. Feeding the Wiindigoo: Bureaucracy and Hunger in Native Literatures; Joshua Miner10. Unthinking Consumption and Arrested Melancholia in Bienvenido Santos' "The Excursionists"; Malini Johar Schueller
Synopsis
This collection investigates modern imperialist practices and their management of hunger through its punctuated distribution amongst asymmetrically related marginal populations. Drawing on relevant material from Egypt, Ireland, India, Ukraine, and other regions of the globe, The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger is a rigorously comparative study made up of ten essays by well-established scholars from universities around the world. Since modernity, we have been inhabitants of a globe increasingly connected through discourses of equal access for all humans to the resources of the planet, but the volume emphasizes alongside this reality the flagrant politicization of those same resources. From this emphasis, the essays in the volume place into relief the idea that ideological and aesthetic discourses of hunger could inform ethical thinking and practices about who or what constitutes the figure of the modern historical human.