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 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Akihito Yokoyama/Alamy Stock Photo Cover design by Jenny Vong Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland 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.