The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger

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.

Offers a multidisciplinary, yet cohesive set of contributions on the topic, with areas covered ranging from Victorian literature to Postcolonial literature and culture, Memory Studies to Eastern European and Jewish Studies Uses close readings of specific cultural artifacts to engage with and concretize the historical and theoretical interventions offered by previously-published foundational works on hunger and culture Addresses the politics of modern hunger through the discourse of transcendental human rights in relation to the rights provided by nation-states to their citizens

Autorentext

Anastasia Ulanowicz is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida, USA. She is author of Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children's Literature: Ghost Images (2015) and associate editor of ImageTexT.

Manisha Basu is Associate Professor of English and African Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. She is author of The Rhetoric of Hindu India: Language and Urban Nationalism (2016). Her interests include South Asian literatures and cultures, Anglophone African literatures, postcolonial studies, and literary and critical theory.

Inhalt
Section I. Memory and Trauma.- 1. 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 Rose.- 2. Thinking the Bengal Famine: Catastrophe, Geography, and the Narrative Genres; Sourit Bhattacharya.- 3. 'A Sound Without a Message': Embodied Memory, Childhood, and the Representation of Famine in Oksana Zabushko's The Museum of Abandoned Secrets; Anastasia Ulanowicz.- Section II. The Body and the Body Politic.- 4. A Protest of the Poor: On the Political Meaning of the People; Sherene Seikaly.- 5. Gendered Political Economies and the Feminization of Hunger: M.F.K. Fisher and the Cold War Culture Wars; Christina Van Houten.- 6. Gourmand or Glutton?: Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Representations of the Corpulent in a Climate of Want; Rachael Newberry.- Section III. Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts.- 7. Refusing to Represent the Great Hunger: Metaphor and the Palimpsest in Irish Film; Dana Och.- 8. (Trans-) National Iconographies of Hunger in Cold War America; Katharina Fackler.- 9. Feeding the Wiindigoo: Bureaucracy and Hunger in Native Literatures; Joshua Miner.- 10. Unthinking Consumption and Arrested Melancholia in Bienvenido Santos' The Excursionists; Malini Johar Schueller.