Table Of ContentHunger and Postcolonial Writing
Hunger and Postcolonial Writing explores contemporary postcolonial fiction and
life-writing from various geopolitical contexts.
Thefocusofthisworkishunger–individuatedintheself-imposedstarvationof
the hunger protester, and on a mass scale in the form of famine and food
insecurity. It considers the hungry colonial and postcolonial body, examines
its textual forms and historical trajectories, and situates it within the food
security context of imperialism and its legacies. This book is the first
monograph-length study of hunger within a postcolonial/world literary
context. Its transcolonial focus produces comparative readings across postcolonial
writings, facilitating productive analyses of the operations of imperialism and its
after-effects across heterogeneous zones of colonialism. This project reads hunger
asdefinedbythesocial,cultural,historical,andeconomicengagementsproduced
bycolonialandpostcolonialencounters.Examiningthestarvingcolonializedbody
throughCartesianmodelsofsomaticsubjectivityandconsideringhowthisbodyis
mediatedbypost-EnlightenmentdiscoursesofModernityandprogress,thiswork
interrogates the contradictions produced by the starving colonial body as it is
positioned between the possibility of radical protest and prescriptive colonial
discourse.
This book will appeal to scholars and students interested in food studies,
postcolonial studies, human geography, sociology, and literature studies.
MuznaRahmanisalecturerin Englishat Manchester Metropolitan University,
UK.
Critical Food Studies
Series editors: Michael K. Goodman, University of Reading, UK, and Colin
Sage, Independent Scholar
The study of food has seldom been more pressing or prescient. From the
intensifying globalisation of food, a world-wide food crisis and the continuing
inequalities of its production and consumption, to food’s exploding media pre-
sence, and its growing re-connections to places and people through ‘alternative
food movements’, this seriespromotes critical explorations of contemporary food
cultures and politics. Building on previous but disparate scholarship, its overall
aims are to develop innovative and theoretical lenses and empirical material in
ordertocontributeto–butalsobegintomorefullydelineate–theconfinesand
confluences of an agenda of critical food research and writing.
Of particular concern are original theoretical and empirical treatments of the
materialisations of food politics, meanings and representations, the shifting
political economies and ecologies of food production and consumption and the
growing transgressions between alternative and corporatist food networks.
Food System Transformations
Social Movements, Local Economies, Collaborative Networks
Edited by Cordula Kropp, Irene Antoni-Komar and Colin Sage
Metaphor, Sustainability, Transformation
Transdisciplinary Perspectives
Edited by Ian Hughes, Edmond Byrne, Gerard Mullally and Colin Sage
Food and Cooking on Early Television in Europe
Impact on Postwar Foodways
Edited by Ana Tominc
Hunger and Postcolonial Writing
Muzna Rahman
Food Sovereignty and Urban Agriculture
Concepts, Politics, and Practice in South Africa
Anne Siebert
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Cri-
tical-Food-Studies/book-series/CFS
Hunger and Postcolonial
Writing
Muzna Rahman
Firstpublished2022
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DOI:10.4324/9781315505930
TypesetinBembo
byTaylor&FrancisBooks
To Ammu and Bapi, who allowed me to stray so far from
home, to find and pave my own path.
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
1 Introduction – (Post)colonialism, Hunger, and the Body 1
2 (Post)colonial Foodways and Transhistorical Hungers in Kiran
Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss 35
3 The Text, Starving Body, and J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of
Michael K 68
4 Anorexic Fictions and Starving Histories in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s
Nervous Conditions 101
5 Traumatic National Hungers and the Starving Irish Body: Bobby
Sands’ 1981 Hunger Strike 131
Index 179
Acknowledgements
Thank you to everyone at Routledge and beyond who supported me with
patience and kindness during the process of publishing this work– Faye Leerink,
Nonita Saha, Ruth Anderson, Pris Corbett, and Katherine Laidler. A special
thanks to Series Editor, Professor Mike Goodman, who made the process as
stress-free as possible and was always an encouraging and supportive virtual
presence throughout.
I am in debt to my PhD supervisors, Dr Anastasia Valassopoulos and Dr
Robert Spencer, who helped me start, shape, and finish my doctoral project
uponwhichthisbookisbased,andprovidedexemplarymodelsofhowtoboth
teach and be taught.
Thank you to all my friends at the University of Manchester, Manchester
Metropolitan University, and beyond – too numerous to name – for their
constant help, support, and company.
Thank you to my extended family in Bangladesh – especially my seven
stalwart Aunties – who gave me care, shelter, and the comfort of family while I
began reworking this research for publication.
A special thanks to Dora for supporting me while I pushed this project over
the finish line. Support can take many forms, and you provided every kind in
abundance.
–
1 Introduction (Post)colonialism,
Hunger, and the Body
This book examines hunger in contemporary postcolonial writing. Using an
interdisciplinary Food Studies theoretical framework, with a particular focus on
gastrocriticalapproaches,thisprojectinterrogatesthevariousnarrativeandpolitical
forms produced by the dialectics of self-imposed hunger, by the colonial/
postcolonial subject in postcolonial writing. Other forms of hunger are also
explored throughout this work, namely instances of food insecurity and
famine. The hunger strike is placed within this historical and socio-political
context of food deprivation. By situating the hunger-striking body within a
larger material history of hunger, this book frames both types of hunger as
politicizedconditions,entrenchedwithinalargerlegacyofBritishimperialism.
Hunger-as-protest takeson amyriadof forms in this study,andthisscholarshipis
largelyconcernedwiththepotentialpoliticalvalue(orlackthereof)intheseforms
of protest, as well as a variety of ontological, political, and epistemological
contradictions that the hunger strike produces.
This work focuses on contemporary postcolonial writing from 1980 to 2006.
Thetextsareallsetbetweenthe1960sandthe1980s.Althoughthereareelements
of transnationality in some of these texts, largely they refer to Zimbabwe, South
Africa, India, and Northern Ireland. Thus, although geographically broad, the
historicalfocusofthisprojectisrelativelynarrow.Thehistoricallimitsrepresented
by these texts, and the common forms of British imperialism considered, enable
situatingthesetextssidebyside,asdothetext’sindebtednessintoanAnglophone
literary tradition. However, the differences between them are widened con-
siderably by the different socio-cultural and historical contexts that each text
covers. This project’s focus on the specific forms of national and self-imposed
hunger, I believe, closes this gap. Hunger ‘occupied a central place in both the
English and the colonial imagination.’1 I examine these texts in the spirit of
transcoloniality – ‘in that it connects heterogenous (post)colonial sites in a critical
and comparative exploration of coloniality.’2 As Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei
ShihargueinMinorTransnationalism,3‘lateral’comparisonsacrossdisparatesocio-
political sites of colonialism can be productive, especially within the context of
globalization and the interconnectedness of nation states. The postcoloniality
interrogated in these texts, in Deepika Bahri’s words, examines ‘different writers
taking up a temporally discontinuous but thematically connected screed on
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