The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger

294 Pages·2017·2.55 MB·English

by  Anastasia Ulanowicz

EDITED BY
ANASTASIA ULANOWICZ AND MANISHA BASU
The Aesthetics
and Politics of
Global Hunger
The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger
Anastasia Ulanowicz · Manisha Basu
Editors
The Aesthetics and
Politics of Global
Hunger
Editors
Anastasia Ulanowicz Manisha Basu
Department of English Department of English
University of Florida University of Illinois,
Gainesville, FL, USA Urbana–Champaign
Champaign, IL, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-47484-7 ISBN 978-3-319-47485-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47485-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017943665
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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C
ontents
1 Hungry; or, Human? 1
Manisha Basu
Part I Memory and Trauma
2 Oskar Rosenfeld, the Lodz Ghetto,
and the Chronotope of Hunger 27
Sven-Erik Rose
3 The Question of Literary Form: Realism in the Poetry
and Theater of the 1943 Bengal Famine 57
Sourit Bhattacharya
4 “A Sound Without a Message”: Childhood, Embodied
Memory, and the Representation of Famine in Oksana
Zabushko’s The Museum of Abandoned Secrets 89
Anastasia Ulanowicz
v
vi CONTENTS
Part II The Body and the Body Politic
5 Gendered Political Economies and the Feminization of
Hunger: M.F.K. Fisher and the Cold War Culture Wars 115
Christina Van Houten
6 A Protest of the Poor: On the Political Meaning
of the People 135
Sherene Seikaly
7 Gourmand or Glutton? Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
and Representations of the Corpulent in a Climate
of Want 157
Rachael Newberry
Part III Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts
8 The Missing Dead of the Great Hunger:
Metaphor and Palimpsest in Irish Film 177
Dana Och
9 (Trans-)National Hunger: Cold War Famine
Iconographies in the United States 205
Katharina M. Fackler
10 Consuming the Wiindigoo: Native Figurations
of Hunger and Food Bureaucracy 229
Joshua D. Miner
11 Unthinking Consumption and Arrested Melancholia
in Bienvenido Santos’ “The Excursionists” 259
Malini Johar Schueller
12 Afterword: Hunger as Performance 277
Pallavi Banerjee and Ranita Ray
Index 287
e C
ditors and ontributors
About the Editors
Anastasia Ulanowicz is Associate Professor of English at the University
of Florida, where she researches and teaches courses in children’s litera-
ture, historical fiction, visual rhetoric, and trauma studies. Her book,
Second-Generation Memory and Contemporary Children’s Literature: Ghost
Images (Routledge, 2013) received the Children’s Literature Association
Book Award in 2015. She is the associate editor of ImageTexT.
Manisha Basu is Associate Professor of English, African Studies, and
Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Hindu India: Language
and Urban Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Her inter-
ests include South Asian literatures and cultures, Anglophone African lit-
eratures, postcolonial studies, and literary and critical theory.
Contributors
Pallavi Banerjee is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of
Calgary. Her research interests are situated at the intersections of soci-
ology of immigration, gender and feminist theory, racialization, trans-
national labor, and minority families. She is currently working on her
vii
viii EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
book manuscript tentatively titled: Dismantling Dependence: Gendered
Migrations and Intersectional Visa Regimes that explores how the immi-
gration policies and visa regimes of the United States affect immigrant
families of Indian highly skilled workers.
Sourit Bhattacharya received his Ph.D in English and Comparative
Literary Studies from the University of Warwick where he wrote a thesis
on catastrophe, crisis, and literary form in the postcolonial Indian novel.
His research interests include environment and disaster studies, postco-
lonial and world literatures, and materialist aesthetics. His writings have
appeared in such journals as ARIEL, Textual Practice, and Interventions
and in edited volumes, most recently Postcolonial Urban Outcasts
(Routledge, 2016).
Katharina M. Fackler is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the
University of Graz, Austria. She completed her Ph.D. at the University
of Regensburg, Germany, in 2015 with a project on the visual politics
of the rediscovery of poverty in the early Cold War U.S. Her publica-
tions and research interests focus on social documentary photography,
the ethics and affects of visual representation, poverty and class, African
American protest, and Cold War culture.
Joshua D. Miner is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and
affiliate faculty in Indigenous Studies at the University of Kansas, where
he specializes in global Indigenous activist film and media, digital aes-
thetics, and procedural narrative, relative to the ways Indigenous artists
intervene in health and environmental policy.
Rachael Newberry obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck College, University
of London and has taught at a number of reputable London universities.
She is currently Fractional Lecturer in the Department of Theater and
Performance at Goldsmiths College where she teaches across a range of spe-
cialisms from Shakespeare, Literary Theory and Theater History through
to post-modern and avant-garde dramatic texts. She currently convenes
Shakespeare’s London and State of the Nation British Drama and has inter-
ests are in the fields of gastro-criticism and the work of the new generation
of young British female playwrights. Newberry is a book review contributor
for the journal, Contemporary Women’s Writing.
EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS ix
Dana Och is Lecturer II in English and Film Studies at the University of
Pittsburgh where she also serves as Assistant Director of Undergraduate
Film Studies Program. She concentrates on questions of genre, Irish
film, and horror, including publications on Neil Jordan, the postcolo-
nial zombie comedy, Twin Peaks, and the neopostmodern horror film.
She co-edited the anthology Transnational Horror Across Visual Media:
Fragmented Bodies (Routledge 2014).
Ranita Ray is Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Nevada,
Las Vegas. She is author of The Making of A Teenage Service Class:
Poverty and Mobility in an American City (University of California
Press). She has published articles on urban issues in Social Problems and
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.
Sven-Erik Rose is Associate Professor of German and Comparative
Literature, and an affiliate of Jewish Studies, at the University of California,
Davis. His book Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848
(Brandeis University Press, 2014) was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer Book
Award in 2015 by the Association for Jewish Studies for the category of
Philosophy and Jewish Thought. His current research focuses on two bodies
of Holocaust writing: texts by Jews confined to Nazi ghettos and Holocaust
survivor testimony collected in the immediate aftermath of WWII.
Malini Johar Schueller is Professor of English at the University of Florida.
She is the author of The Politics of Voice: Liberalism and Social Criticism
from Franklin to Kingston (1992), U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and
Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (1998), and Locating Race: Global Sites
of Post-Colonial Citizenship (2009). She has co-edited Messy Beginnings:
Postcoloniality and Early American Studies (with Edward Watts, 2003),
Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism
(with Ashley Dawson, 2007), and Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom
and the National Security Campus (with Ashley Dawson, 2009). She has
also made a documentary film about racism and police violence called In
His Own Home. Her essays have appeared in journals such as American
Literature, American Literary History, SIGNS, Cultural Critique, Genders,
and Social Text as well as popular publications such as Counterpunch.
She is currently working on a book, Campaigns of Knowledge: Tutelary
Colonialism in the Philippines and Occupied Japan.
x EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. Seikaly’s Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy
in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores how
Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used economy to shape
territory, nationalism, the home, and the body. She is the editor of the
Arab Studies Journal, co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya e-zine, an
editor of Journal of Palestine Studies, a policy member of Al-Shabaka, the
Palestinian Policy Network, and an advisory member of R-Shief Online
Archive Project.
Christina Van Houten is Lecturer in the Expository Writing Program
at New York University. She specializes in twentieth and twenty-first cen-
tury literature and culture, with an emphasis on late modernism. Other
research interests include critical and feminist theory and critical region-
alism.