Llana, Jazmin. “Reflection: Beyond Metaphor: Hunger and the Response-ability of Performance.” Global Performance Studies, vol. 6, nos. 1–2, 2023, https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv6n1-2a141
In conversation with: Richard Gough, Swati Parashar, Camilla Orjuela, Patrick Anderson, Sruti Bala and Marian Roces, keynote speakers at the PSi#27 Hunger Conference in 2022; Adrian Kear, Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson, keynote moderators; and Jenny Edkins and Rob Nixon who were not at the conference but whose writings have been inspirational and instructive in thinking about hunger and hunger action. Gough, Kear, Anderson, Clark and Peterson have contributed articles in these concurrent journal issues that I quote from; their ideas provide a kind of through line in the conversation.
How can performance and performance studies respond to real hunger in ways that are ethical and efficacious and yet resist the easy slippage to metaphor and the violence of representation? I think this question is the kernel of what we were asking in the Performance Studies international 2022 conference on the theme of hunger and in the call for contributions to these Performance Research and GPS: Global Performance Studies concurrent journal issues on hunger. I begin with the rhetorical “I think” because this is a reflection that attempts to make sense of the conversations on the fraught topic of hunger. The article does not offer conclusions but follows a process of thinking through, enabled by a methodology of gathering at the conference and here in these issues. We gathered to talk, discuss, share ideas and experiences, but also to commit and spend time and attention together, and share meals during the conference “receptions” even if separated by physical distances because everything happened in digital space. We gathered to address hard questions we asked ourselves because we decided we should be asking these questions. I am thinking of these questions in the aftermath of the conference, which happened almost two years ago now, and close to the end of the publication process for the journals, already informed by the many answers offered and the complexities of these responses.
The essay is not a summary or synthesis. It is also not a re-presentation of the contributions to these issues. But it is styled as a conversation with the speakers at the conference, with the reflections in the wrap-up session and with the writings of Jenny Edkins on hunger and food aid and of Rob Nixon on slow violence. This article is an afterword that picks up from the introduction by my co-editors Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson in a process of editorial reflection, as a special task for me who initiated and facilitated the engagement with hunger. In what follows, the essay recalls the contexts and prompts of the conference and journal issues, identifies key threads of the challenge posed by hunger to performance and performance studies, and ends with possible ways forward in responding to hunger.
In April 2020, I started the Hunger Action Group at De La Salle University in the Philippines, working with the university’s social action team[1] in response to a prompt by Br. Armin Luistro of the Brothers of the Christian Schools. Brother Armin urged us to craft an action programme on hunger in the Philippines that had then become much worse during the pandemic. And when I drafted the proposal for the 2022 annual conference of Performance Studies international, I suggested the theme of hunger. The PSi Board approved the proposal and the conference happened in July 2022. The objective of the conference was to enable conversations on the specific ways through which performance studies’ methodologies and practices can contribute to global activism and discourse-making against hunger. However, the idea of working on hunger as a focal theme for research and artistic practice was inspired by two things: the work of Spatula&Barcode[2] that I first encountered at the PSi conference in Melbourne in 2016, and a 1999 issue of Performance Research that had articles from a 1994 conference on the theme “Points of contact: Performance, food, and cookery” organized in Cardiff, United Kingdom by Richard Gough and the Centre for Performance Research. In the editorial of this issue, Richard Gough highlights Enzo Cozzi’s point about how food is a political issue and a matter of survival for many people (Gough, “Editorial” iv).[3] And so preparing for the PSi conference and working with Spatula&Barcode widened the scope and perspective of the need to respond to the issue of hunger. More importantly, it became starkly clear that the issue is a global one that compels a response from artists, scholars, and practitioners of performance.
At the end of May 2022, Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson, the duo behind Spatula&Barcode, came to De La Salle University in Manila to work on a project that we called Foodways Philippines. The idea for the project was that it would provide a hunger action component for the conference programme of PSi 2022. It would be an artistic project but also an immersive and co-performative hunger action with partner communities of the university. The Foodways Philippines project aimed, among others, to amplify issues of hunger and efforts at hunger mitigation on an international level and to galvanize responsive action and thinking within the field of performance and performance studies.
I realized from the outset and saw in the actual organization of the conference and throughout the hunger actions in the Philippines that what may seem to be very straightforward, the response to hunger, is in fact quite complicated.
In Manila, when we decided to start the Hunger Action Group, one of the prompts was a report of people from low-income communities who breached the lockdown to look for food. At the risk of being arrested by the police and military, which then-President Rodrigo Duterte mobilized to execute stringent quarantine controls, the people went to the streets demanding government assistance. “If not by coronavirus, they believe death will come from hunger,” the news agency Rappler reported, saying the poor were not afraid of the COVID-19 pandemic but of starvation caused by the lockdown (Talabong and Gavilan). Hunger and starvation are always the net effects of disaster and disease, especially in the case of COVID-19, which halted the economy everywhere in the world for a prolonged period and drove millions of people out of work. But while the pandemic had exacerbated the problem, it was not the cause of the problem. People who have access to resources or control the distribution of resources are not in the same situation as those who have no access or have lost even the power to earn income and buy food. In Filipino we say, ang mga dating walang-wala ay lalong walang-walang na talaga—those who had nothing at all have become even more so. The problem is structural and systemic, and the pandemic only made this fact stark and visible for all to see.
According to the United Nations (UN), there has been an “alarming increase” in the numbers of hungry people across the world since 2015,
a trend exacerbated by a combination of factors including the pandemic, conflict, climate change, and deepening inequalities […]. By 2022, approximately 735 million people—or 9.2% of the world’s population—found themselves in a state of chronic hunger […].
Extreme hunger and malnutrition remain a barrier to sustainable development and create a trap from which people cannot easily escape. Hunger and malnutrition mean less productive individuals, who are more prone to disease and thus often unable to earn more and improve their livelihoods. (United Nations, “Sustainable Development Goals – Goal 2: Zero Hunger”)
And so the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal #2 aims to end all forms of hunger and malnutrition by 2030 by means of, among others, “a profound change of the global food and agriculture system” and “investment in the agricultural sector […] improving food security, creating employment and building resilience to disasters and shocks.” Six years to the target year, the reports are dire, projecting approximately 600 million to suffer hunger by 2030, “an immense challenge for the zero hunger target” (United Nations 2024).
A profound systemic change is needed indeed, and it must go beyond the global food and agricultural system and redress the sharp social and economic inequalities of our societies. When we started the DLSU Hunger Action Group, we knew only that we needed to do something. We were no experts, nor did we know much about hunger. So we started with educating ourselves and looking for a way to think through the advocacy. And we agreed on how to frame this.
Hunger dehumanizes. Hunger kills. Both the body and the spirit. Hunger works directly against the most fundamental human right: the right to life. It compromises at every instance the inherent quality of being that makes humans rise above mere animal survival: the “dignity and worth of the human person,” as stated in the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The right to life essentially equates to what the United Nations Human Rights Council technically identifies as the “economic, social, and cultural rights” and listed as the first of these rights is the “right to food,” which has four elements: availability, accessibility, adequacy, and sustainability. (De La Salle University Hunger Action Group)
The toolkit on “the right to food” of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights describes these four elements, which are conditions for this right to be guaranteed.
But the issue of global hunger goes beyond ensuring access, availability, adequacy, and sustainability of food resources for the most vulnerable sectors. More to the point—and this is where the DLSU Hunger Action Group radically diverge from the UN articulation—the issue goes beyond a pragmatic concern for the productivity of well-fed and healthy individuals or decreasing the numbers of social dependents. Hunger is, instead, an issue of equity and justice that must prevail and endure. Actions to address hunger should recognize and combat the existing severe inequities and must change the numbers and proportions of those who have and can and those who do not have and cannot have access, or cannot partake of available, or much less, adequate, food. This is the radical meaning of “sustainability” in terms of the right to food and the right to life.
Clark and Peterson endorse this framing, saying that “hunger constrains the fundamental human right to life in a way that is brutally material, but it also stifles the fundamental human right to thrive” (Clark and Peterson, Sabbatical Plan), affirming the Hunger Action Group’s statement that the right to thrive is “a right not just to have access to resources, to be fed, but to exercise their human capacities to produce and create food for themselves and for others” (DLSU Hunger Action Group). In the Lasallian hunger action project statement this is further expressed as “food and nutrition equity and justice that combats dehumanizing hunger to promote and support human life with dignity in a humane world for all.” And the expressed methodology for both hunger research and action is one of “co-action, co-production, and co-performance: [w]e fight hunger and advocate for food and nutrition equity and justice with the hungry” (DLSU Hunger Action Group, emphasis in original).
The twenty-seventh conference of Performance Studies international was an attempt by the association to know how performance studies might understand and respond to hunger, which oppresses millions of people in the world and yet has been largely addressed by people in the sciences. As then vice president of PSi, I was tasked by the PSi Board to organize the conference with a team of Board directors who volunteered and an advisory committee consisting of former PSi officers and key contacts in various parts of the world.[4] We grappled with pragmatic matters especially on the finance aspect, because having a conference on a very focused topic like hunger was surely a losing proposition. Indeed, when the call was made and the question was asked, we found that only very few colleagues in performance studies are engaged in hunger research and action. And so, moving forward with it was a brave decision to invest the organization’s resources in an endeavour that we believed needed doing, to act on our desire to seek answers to very real questions on the relevance of what we do as performance studies practitioners for the world suffering from hunger. It helped that the PSi Board was directly organizing the conference instead of the usual arrangement of having a host university. We could decide without burdening a host institution with the cost of the decision. But the challenge of putting together the conference programme was enormous, given the very few submissions. We had to think outside the proverbial box of conference programmes.
As it turned out, the conference programme included discussions by invited scholars and practitioners who work in other fields, making the conference an interdisciplinary conversation with artists and academics who are engaged in hunger research and action and those who only came to listen. Three keynote sessions, two roundtables, several response panels, and hunger action sessions had speakers from the social sciences, agriculture, and development work, many of them engaged in advocacy work on hunger. Despite the small participant turnout, there was a wide variety of thematic threads, from artists working with food pantries and community gardens during the pandemic to academics exploring interspecies connections and the political act of self-starvation.
For many who attended, it was a “listening” or “learning” conference, which was not such a bad thing although different from the usual practice of going to a conference to present work. As pointed out in the wrap-up discussion, “one can go to a conference to learn about something” and this can be a model for conferences (Annette Arlander in Performance Studies international, “Transcript of wrap-up session”). It is crucial to note, however, that PSi colleagues felt they were not sufficiently engaged enough with the thematic focus on hunger to contribute. There was “a sense of anxiety, hesitation, and frustration in the face of a topic that is so big and so challenging and so urgent” and yet there was also “a sense of determination, commitment, and the possibility of transformation through artistic practice and the application of performance studies methodologies—of taking something and transforming it and revealing it as something different” (Bruce Barton in Performance Studies international, “Transcript of wrap-up session).
In his keynote talk Richard Gough remarked on this dual and conflicting experience of performance as being unable to address hunger and yet having the capacity to inspire and prompt action. Responding to Enzo Cozzi’s provocation from the 1994 conference he organized, and that the conference call references, Gough ruminates on the “unrepresentability of hunger” that Cozzi propounds.
The difficulty to re-present hunger it seems to me is the impossibility for performance to adequately, or effectively to engage with it. But it is also a problem for the imagination. Hunger is too real, graphic, too present, pervasive, and unassailable. (Gough, “Points of contact”)
Attempts to represent hunger often become unethical and exploitative, adding to the horror and violence. “Is it their graphic portrayal of the real, their harrowing presence and agonising presentation of the unimaginable, that renders performance or representation inadequate, ineffectual, invalid?” (Gough, “Points of contact”). Indeed, for Cozzi, the intervention that representation might accomplish will always be too late. “From the perspective of those dying of starvation, this world is already ending every day, apocalypse is now” (Cozzi 121).
The question therefore that we posed for ourselves in the PSi 2022 conference on the theme of hunger is, “How can performance studies articulate and intervene in the apocalyptic scenario of hunger, injustice, and death that is relentlessly happening before us, amongst us, all around us, while we stop to ask this question?” (Performance Studies international, “Call for proposals: PSi#27”). But perhaps the real questions are can we intervene and why and what do we hope to accomplish? Perhaps the real point is that performance cannot intervene and will not accomplish anything.
In performance, the body gestures, that is all. It sounds the pain, the grief, the keening, indescribable howling, but fails to reverse anything. The gesture cannot remain. The sound fades into nothingness... The performance embodies an inability to adequately respond to history, the incapacity to turn back time, retrieve the bodies and save the village from the catastrophe—of violence, of war, of hunger.[5] (Llana 46)
The first keynote panel in the 2022 PSi Hunger Conference with Swati Parashar and Camilla Orjuela spoke about hunger as “slow violence” that injures and kills vulnerable populations in “invisible geographies” (Parashar; also see Parashar and Orjuela). Keynote moderator Adrian Kear defined slow violence referencing Rob Nixon who first used the term to refer to the long-term injury suffered from the effects of environmental threats:
a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all […] neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. (Nixon 2)
The harm inflicted by slow violence “mutates and looks beyond its original causes” and the notion enables thinking of famines or mass hunger as slow violent events (Parashar). As with Rob Nixon, Parashar and Orjuela identified the “Global South” as the site where this violence often plays out. The victims of hunger are depicted as weak, feminized, and infantilized, “visualized as emaciated, frail, unaesthetic shrinking bodies usually of women and children waiting for imminent death” and “feminized male bodies”—“hunger as feminized violence” (Parashar). While it is true that hunger has its worst consequences for women and children, the gendered depictions emphasize a fiction, that the victims of hunger are weak, voiceless, and cannot resist—"famine as violence without resistance”—“people just die; they starve and they die, but we know that’s not true […] there have been food riots and people resist when they are starving.” Because hunger is not thought of as violence it does not get the needed attention and concern as much as “the immediate, the visceral, and the visible” violence of war and revolution (Parashar).
Of course, we still need to continue to try to understand why war, genocide, and other great human rights abuses happen and try to prevent them. There's no doubt about that. But we also need to put our effort into understanding the slow, the less obvious, and less visible types of violence […] hunger being one of the more important ones. (Orjuela)
Understanding hunger as slow violence
allows us to bear witness to the shifting temporalities of violence as we think about accountability and justice through specific forms of famine memorialisation. How and what we remember and also forget about famines are essential to reframe their violence and highlight the accountability and culpability of individuals and institutions. (Parashar)
An example of this act of memorialization is the “famine walk” commemorating an 18-kilometre walk in 1849 of people from Louisburgh to Doolough Valley in Ireland during the height of the Great Irish Famine of 1845–9. The people were told they could get aid at Delphi Lodge, but the officials refused to see them, and they had to walk back amidst strong rain and hail. Many fell dead from hunger, exhaustion or disease. If not for this initiative by some activists who started the walk in 1988, this story would have been forgotten. The “famine walk” has continued every year since 1988 and at the Doolough Valley a memorial to this tragic walk reads: “to commemorate the hungry poor who walked here in 1849 and walk the third world today,” clearly expressing solidarity with hungry people in the poor countries of the world (Orjuela).
Performance cannot bring the dead back to life, but it can potentially prevent further deaths from the slow violence of hunger. Richard Gough in the third keynote session ended his talk with a reading of the Stone Soup story that opens a way forward in thinking about how performance can respond.
[W]hoever initiates the cooking, once the cauldron is boiling and the stones are immersed, curiosity and a sense of participation lead the villagers to contribute whatever they have. Incrementally they add to the apparent sustenance of stones. One offers a few potatoes, another some carrots, someone has some beef bones and so the contributions go on (and in) until a wonderful broth bubbles gently. All partake, all are nourished, the Stone Soup is the most wonderous stew they have ever devoured, the stones rest at the bottom of the vessel, their purpose passed.
Perhaps these stones could function as the foundation of an artist-driven network, addressing hunger, and act, dare one say, perform, in a similar way. (Gough, “Points of contact”)
And yet we must recognize what looks like an impulse to “grasp at straws” as the cliché goes and thereby understand the “anxiety and frustration” from feeling inadequate to act on hunger. I am thinking of what Alan Read suggests as the field’s “crisis” and “melancholia” (Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement 25) “standing in for the conduct of politics elsewhere, where there is something real to be achieved, defended, spoken up for or identified” (65). He asks performance academics to reconsider—”performative politics at every turn of a true journey, one that really does go from A to B” (Read, Theatre in the Expanded Field 44). I realize this essay might be read as exhibiting this crisis and melancholia, one that can be traced albeit in simple terms to the old question of efficacy haunting performance studies practice. During the conference wrap-up Jon McKenzie remarked on the still ongoing “tension between presence and trans/mediation” evident in the conference discussions, and that “presence is covered with blood that goes back about 2000 years” (McKenzie in Performance Studies international, “Transcript of wrap-up session at PSi#27”). These hauntings, however, have engaged the field in very complex ways, starting with the fact that the inadequacy does not stem from a lack of desire to be of consequence to the world but that this desire is precisely what needs to be rethought. In his essay in this Performance Research hunger issue, Adrian Kear emphasizes this point:
Questioning the ethics of intellectual engagement and critical practice seems essential if we are to avoid attenuating the reality of global hunger and over‐extending an aesthetic‐political claim of what performance can do […]. At the very least it engenders a commitment not to reproduce its operation and to decolonize performance as a mode of knowledge production. (Kear, “A Different Hunger”)
“How can we help?” was the loaded question in the many hunger actions undertaken and shared. This was the case for instance with “Foodways Philippines,” one of the roundtable panels that reported on a project in the Philippines where I collaborated with the art collective Spatula&Barcode and the subject of one of the essays. In that project, we did not start anything but worked with an already ongoing effort—adding “lagniappe” or “something extra” as Clark and Peterson say. But whatever the conditions or circumstances in the areas we chose to work in and with, we were guided by two principles. The first principle was always openness to what we would find and acting accordingly. Referring to Gough’s take on the Stone Soup story, we could be the initiators of a stone soup to which others would contribute ingredients or we could be those who add potatoes or beef bones to a soup already started by an advocate group. The second principle was a readiness to self-critique our intention to help, rethinking our capacity and authority to do so. We must be ready to accept that we cannot help.
Hunger action can be both very fulfilling and frustrating for those doing the action and it is certainly not enough to end hunger. When one feeds the hungry, one saves a life for the moment, one person at a time. Perhaps there is an “incremental” effect, as Gough suggests, on increasing the number of people who contribute to the effort and on lessening the number of hungry people. This is akin to the “slow, small, careful actions [which] are what make and remake the world” (Edkins, Change and the Politics of Certainty 89). Jenny Edkins argues for these small actions even as she highlights the tension between “giving one person a bed for the night and changing the world” (88), interpreting a poem by Bertolt Brecht: “A few people have a bed for the night / For a night the wind is kept from them / The snow meant for them falls on the roadway” (Brecht cited in Edkins, Change and the Politics of Certainty 73).
Although this “won’t change the world,” it does mean “a few men have a bed for the night” […]. [But] there is more to be said. What remains to be said is the other side of the coin: that the fact that a few people have a bed for the night won’t change the world. (Edkins, Change and the Politics of Certainty 73)
These two are in tension: attempts to change the world can stop us carrying out more immediate actions to relieve suffering, while on the other hand, alleviating the suffering that is immediately apparent can hide the need to seek to end systems of oppression. Our language ties us in knots here, and we do not know what to do. (Edkins, Change and the Politics of Certainty 86)
This is the tension we must confront and be reconciled to when we help feed the hungry and act on “our hunger for social and political change” (Kear, “A Different Hunger”), our desire to change the world.
Hunger action is fraught with issues. Where to help? Who to feed? How? Even what to feed them with? “Whose hunger?” is the question Edkins addresses in her book with this title, in which she discusses the politics of world food aid. She challenges the humanitarian ethos in hunger relief actions and argues that hunger is not a technical or scientific condition that modern science, indeed modernity, will solve, but by itself is symptomatic of modernity (Edkins Whose Hunger?, xv) and its technologization and resulting depoliticization of famine or hunger (xvi). As Edkins puts it, “technical solutions merely reinstate and reproduce one of the precise forms of politics—modern politics [or biopolitics]—that produce famine in the first place” (ibid.). Humanitarian efforts intended to help the hungry are driven by an ethos that subscribes to the logic of the modern episteme, and so even if humanitarianism seems to be an ethical response to the problem of global hunger, it is doomed to reproduce rather than eliminate the causes of hunger. Humanitarian intervention can become a “justification for depoliticization and technologization” (126).
In a later book Edkins reiterates, “It is not at all a given that aid is a good thing” (Change and the Politics of Certainty, 85). People who are hungry or starving are “treated as lives to be saved, lives with no political voice, or what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’” (cited in Edkins, Change and the Politics of Certainty 80). This treatment comes from or is produced by a presumed difference between giver and receiver, and “reinforces the racialised distinctions between donor—white, Western, civilised, wealthy—and recipient: abject, poor, dependent and, most often, black” (86). Ironically, the humanitarian discourse insists on the notion of a “common humanity,” a view of “the human being as a common essence” (83), which thereby obligates donors to give in order to dignify lives that have become inhuman. Edkins argues that this thinking only leads to “the same exclusionary practices that produce the sovereignty of the nation-state, with its narratives of national identity, and produces the same dehumanised, racialised and depoliticised subjects” (83). Humanitarianism thus “works as an ideological fantasy” and “[veils] the operations of a capitalist economy and its production of inequality […] that produce the need for aid in the first place” (84). People contributing to the humanitarian effort, even when they realize that the giving of aid is problematic, still participate or make a donation, say by buying records in the case of the Band Aid campaign for the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s. In doing so they “[externalize their] ethical commitment” (Edkins, Whose Hunger? 122) while “[helping] sustain this fantasy and reproduce the global order of inequality” (Edkins, Change and the Politics of Certainty 77). It’s a clear example of the giver benefiting from the act of giving more than the recipient whose dependence on the giver’s benevolence becomes an eternal bind, as seen in master–slave and landlord–peasant relations, or the contemporary practice of “corporate social responsibility” that often translates into immediate tax reliefs for the donor but rarely provides long-term relief for the recipient.
So how should we think beyond this impasse? Surely we cannot not help? Edkins faces the same questions from students in her classes on hunger. The key to a possible answer is not to think of “atomised individuals” who must then be tied by social bonds like national identity, “but instead look at subjects as produced always already in and through relations with other subjects” (Edkins, Change and the Politics of Certainty 84). It would then be
no longer surprising that people feel compelled to respond to those in distress, since their own existence as subjects depends on the dignity of all and the continuance of the social order. What becomes surprising and in need of explanation instead is why sometimes people see others’ suffering as none of their business. (Edkins, Change and the Politics of Certainty 84)
But the challenge to thought and action posed by hunger goes beyond the critique of humanitarianism. During the first conference keynote discussion, Swati Parashar raised a potential problem of framing hunger as slow violence:
The only way for reparative and restorative justice to happen is to frame hunger as violence, but when this is done, that, also, is a problematic framing—you are securitizing it […]. Calling [famine] a mass crime has its limits... When you make a spectacle into a spectacle... calling it violent [because] nobody’s going to listen [otherwise] and giving it the urgency it deserves... But the performance of the performance, what does it do? (Parashar)
Artists and performance studies practitioners are part of those who feel “compelled to respond,” but, as Adrian Kear elaborates in his essay, we need to critically rethink the desire and compulsion to act, to do something, and how such a response may do more harm than good. Such a response inevitably becomes a work of representation in and through art and performance, which tends to reify or enact another layer of violence (Kear, “A Different Hunger”).
The challenge of marking the slow violence of hunger must therefore begin with the recognition of hunger’s materiality as operating at the limit point of representation, requiring us to reexamine what is rendered visible and invisible by performance’s mode of presentation, enactment, and event. (Kear, “Hunger kills”)
Kear cautions against the tendency of artists and academics to “construct an idealized optic that [allows] us to act as spectators upon it,” when we see “the world removed from us as an object of study or a theatrical scene” (Kear, “Hunger kills”). In both his remarks as keynote moderator and his essay contributed to the Performance Research issue on hunger, he echoes Aimé Césaire’s reminder: “Life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium, and a person who wails is not a dancing bear” (cited in Kear, “Hunger kills”).[6] And thus we are thrown back to Cozzi’s point about the impossibility of theatre and performance intervening in hunger. Another impasse. And again we are urged to say, surely we cannot not help? In her talk at the conference, Sruti Bala made the sharp observation, giving a nod to Kear, that
the difficulty for performance to address [the] question [of hunger] is because hunger as a structural phenomenon is not an event […] but the thinking of hunger as slow violence gives it an event-like quality; there is a risk of securitizing it but there is also the possibility of allowing us to have options for intervention […]. If we talk of slow violence we could also perhaps talk about the slowness of the eventfulness of protest such as that of Irom Sharmila […] it takes a very long time and there [are] no victories to be assigned at certain moments. It’s heroic in some ways but also very anti-heroic. (Bala)
Irom Sharmila’s fasting protest in India, according to Parashar, lasted sixteen years, with the state force feeding her for the entirety of the resistance (Parashar).
The “options for intervention” are many and varied and these have been taken up not only by artists and academics but by the oppressed exercising their agency even in the direst of circumstances and at the risk of the very lives they fight for. This recalls Parashar’s point about the agency of the hungry who do not just starve and die; they resist. In the Foodways Philippines project, Spatula&Barcode also ruminate on such agency about preferences that recipients of food aid do have and express: “beggars can be choosers” (Clark and Peterson, “Ampersand aesthetics”). Many of the conference presentations were in fact about acts of resistance and creative intervention, from the ollas populares in Uruguay and Chile and the community pantries in the Philippines, to the work of celebrity chefs like Massimo Bottura, Ferran Adrià, and José Andrés and the World Food Kitchen that Gough features in his article, and the disaster response of the Art Relief Mobile Kitchen, to the fasting protests by hunger strikers and agentic assertions of anorexic self-starvation.
The challenge posed to performance studies is one of both thought and action. How to think this? What to do? Marian Roces, in her presentation at the conference, provoked us with her critical views on this point:
The matter of the response-ability of performance and indeed performance studies, if I may be so bold, may rest entirely on the acknowledgment of the visceral nearness, the intimacy of death in hunger. It involves a muteness at the core of loudness and amplification and frenzy […]. Hunger whose intimacy with death collapses philosophy and action […] obliges all of us to escape that miasma, that fog, to recognize the durability of the onerous power [that perpetuates hunger] and hence to do what really needs to be done, and that is to dismantle the means of production of hunger. (Roces)
I interpret the “miasma”/“fog” in our thinking as the very same melancholia that Alan Read says haunts the field, cited earlier in this essay, a state we must escape from if we are to act. Patrick Anderson connected to Roces’ point in saying that “hunger fasters hover on the precipice of mortality” and asked us to think through and beyond the
conundrum of this intimacy with death having a strange power and the state’s recognition of the power of hunger strikers and death fasts to intervene [in] the state’s attempt to prolong and maintain this dynamic of embodying absolute control over questions of life and death—hunger becomes a tactic of the state, almost a technology of the state to enable and elaborate its violence. (Anderson “Hunger and the response-ability of performance”)[7]
And yet, “state power is not a homogenous authoritarian machine. It is totalitarian in its totality but not in its methods […]. It works all sides of possibilities and does not do just one thing; it will give women some power, it will take it away with the other hand.” As to the non-state actors, “there is agency but there is victimhood at the same time” (Roces). Sruti Bala addressed this conundrum with the poignant example of hunger striking and lip-sewing, as discussed by the Turkish author Banu Bargu.
These practices not only transgress the boundaries between body and speech, reason and affect, violence and nonviolence, but they also unsettle and challenge the dualisms that are often ascribed to the agents who perform them, especially that of victimhood and perilous agency. As “performative” mechanisms that produce new subjects these practices open up a space in which subjectivity is reconfigured by establishing an intimate relation to truth as the basis of political conduct and of the relation to the “other”. In order to decipher the modality of ethical and political subjectivation at stake in these protests, it is thus imperative to attend carefully to their specific form. (Bargu cited in Bala)
Hunger strikers are “frail” and “vulnerable” and yet they “command a powerful force” that comes “not only from the instrumental demands, but also from the very form of that performance, what [Bargu] calls ‘the protracted and painful but carefully managed process of deliberate self-harm’” (Bala). Indeed, for Gough, “[t]he hunger strike is perhaps the most dangerous and effective entanglement of hunger and performance” (Gough, “Points of contact”).
Let me end this section with Camilla Orjuela’s observation that the conference revealed many interdisciplinary connections in the quest for answers to basic questions about hunger and hunger action, including “how to think of starvation and self-starvation at the same time; if the people who are hungry can use self-starvation against hunger and against the perpetrators of hunger; and how and when can it be used” (Orjuela). Swati Parashar affirms how the conference enabled a space for interdisciplinary conversations, since the attendees came from various areas of practice and drew from different epistemologies: peace studies, international relations, political science, performance studies, cultural studies, and history (Parashar). The following last section of this essay will not directly answer these questions but chart a path towards possible answers.
I asked Precious and Alex, the duo behind the Art Relief Mobile Kitchen in the Philippines,[8] if what they do has anything to do with politics, and the response was that it is in the quality of the food they serve. They choose to serve good food, which is an acknowledgement of the people they feed who are not just a faceless mass. Alex told me he is angry and frustrated at the slow government response to disasters and how nothing seems to have changed in the last ten years to prevent disasters from happening, like putting in place environmental measures. But the decision to set up their kitchen every time a disaster happens and some people need to be fed, that is their politics.
I think this is the kind of slow, small effort that can “make and remake the world” (Edkins 2019), the lesson in the Stone Soup Story (Cozzi; Gough, “Points of contact”), the challenge of “practising slow thought” (Kear, “A Different Hunger”) and “nuanced thinking” (Roces). Talking about the “response-ability of performance” in the first keynote roundtable, Marian Roces urged us “to interrogate philanthropy”, the most common response to hunger by those who have the means to help, including artists, and emphasizes that “our capacity for nuanced thinking is absolutely important because [the global hunger condition] is a hall of mirrors” (Roces); Patrick Anderson spoke of “creative abolition which requires simultaneous emergency work to patch up disparities however we can” (Anderson, “Hunger and the response-ability of performance”); and Sruti Bala asked us “to bear witness and bear in the sense of really holding […]. Witnessing, spectatorship, is really part of the whole conceptual framework of the field, but thinking about what bearing witness could mean is a way to start that creative abolition process.”
We’re actually exceedingly well prepared to do this work. The methods and skills that we use within performance research actually do better than most to infiltrate and investigate these institutions of dispossession and violence and to do the work that I associate with creative abolition, of making profound changes to the world of public safety and the world of belonging […]. We who have trained in the methods of Theatre and Performance actually have a way of understanding through blocking, through choreography, through the way that we think about scenic composition and the relationship between bodies. We have a way of understanding that footage that is particular to our field but translates perfectly to the work of critiquing, engaging with, and then making public the violence of the state in these interactions. (Anderson, “Hunger and the response-ability of performance”)
In a related way, Rob Nixon argues against what he calls “a contortionist concern with representational authority” (28) that he says will only “distract” writer-activists from the “fortitude” they need to act on issues of environmental justice. He identifies these writers as those who “escaped familial poverty” and their “representational authority” stems from a combination of skills learned via a university education or professional training and an “experientially rooted environmentalism” learned when they were poor (ibid.). Their work is important in what he calls “creative activism” (25) that will make the “environmentalism of the poor” visible through their “imaginative writing [that] can make the unapparent appear” (15), and through their “affiliation with movements for environmental justice” (32). Nixon recognizes the dangers of representational authority, citing the “fetishism of form” in the writings of Anne McClintock (31) and argues against the ecocritical literary tendency to define aesthetics as its proper domain. Nixon therefore strongly speaks against “inaction”, which may be interpreted as the logical consequence of the contortionist stance. “The forces of inaction have deep pockets” (39), he says, and these forces include climate change deniers and “bewilderers” (referring to Fanon’s “army of cultural bewilderers”) (40) funded by big corporate money. The work of writer-activists counters these forces of inaction and the slow violence of environmental abuse.
The “contortionist” stance deplored by Nixon may well be the course of inaction caused by the “miasma” (Roces) in our thinking of the issue of hunger and hunger action. And perhaps being caught up in a cloud of confusion and fear is a condition that the field of performance studies and its practitioners must necessarily negotiate. Roces’ story of the cannibalistic Christian paramilitary forces in the Philippine South who terrorized the native inhabitants made up of indigenous and Islamized Lumads in Mindanao comes poignantly to mind. During their heyday in the time of Marcos Sr, they cooked and ate their victims to, allegedly, stave off hunger, and now they boast about it many years later in interviews with Roces. There is no remorse as there was no process of attaining transitional justice. The uncanny juxtaposition of this story with the philanthropic project of Filipino musicians performing to raise 2 million dollars during the pandemic is perhaps part of Roces’ rhetorical armoury, though Roces said she does not want to contrast the two stories. But we cannot miss the subtle if cruel message in what can be a strange version of the more common story of being trapped between deep water and a hard rock wall. If we don’t pay attention, our practice can turn into acts of predation or cannibalism or perpetuate philanthropic systems that reproduce hunger.
But inaction is not an option. Neither can we wait to first fully understand hunger before we decide to act on it. One striking idea from Edkins that is relevant here is how “modernity’s hunger for certainty,” as Edkins puts it, “impedes its ability to do anything about hunger in the physical sense” (Whose Hunger? xviii).
At the root of much modern thought and social scientific investigation is a drive for epistemological certainty, for a secure route to knowledge. Without knowledge, we seem unable to act. This desire for certainty is found, for example, in the search for humanitarianism. We feel a need for a set of principles against which we can measure our decisions before we act. But this search for a moral framework is futile […]. In the same way, we look for general answers to questions about the causes of famine before we feel empowered to act. Moreover, the solutions put in place have to provide the feedback to satisfy assessment requirements. Aid projects have to be capable of providing measurable data. These results verify and legitimize the actions taken and the discursive practices in which they are framed. (Edkins, Whose Hunger? xviii–xix)
What is the point? At the risk of going for an oversimplified and naïve reading, I am interpreting this to support my argument about gut feeling hunger action—that we cannot wait to be certain first before we can, or should, act, or take responsibility. If hunger relief or hunger action presents us with an “impossible dilemma” (Edkins, Whose Hunger? 149)—that pertains to whether or not it responds to or further causes hunger—then this is the perfect situation for acting responsibly and politically: “The existence of impossible dilemmas does not mean that we do nothing. Indeed, it is only in these situations that we can act responsibly” (ibid., my emphasis). For Edkins, “it is not a question of formulating a more adequate theory of famine or a more sophisticated technology of relief, it is a question of politics and decision” (148). This question of politics and decision is not one that requires a yes or no to doing hunger relief but a question of how best to promote good relations or connections between people, since hunger is “a product of power relations” (156).
The answer is not to stop providing famine relief, development assistance, and humanitarian aid […]. It merely implies that such a decision is just that: a political or ethical decision. It cannot be left to experts or the international community. It is not a technological or managerial matter that can be resolved by better theories or techniques. Whether any particular decision is just or not will remain unknown. But although justice itself is impossible, we have a duty to act with responsibility in addressing what Derrida calls the double contradictory imperative. This process—an interminable process of decision making and questioning—is politics. (Edkins, Whose Hunger? 152, emphasis in original)
In the conclusion of Whose Hunger?, Edkins quotes Richard Ashley: “there are no timeless, universal, already prepared answers. There is only the reality of actions working upon actions across all those varied localities where people struggle amidst difficulties, dangers and ambiguities to somehow make life go on” (Ashley cited in Edkins Whose Hunger? 159).
In the case of the Filipino musicians and singers who raised 2 million dollars during the pandemic, there’s a key lesson we learned from Roces’ story. The artists made their philanthropic hunger action to help hungry people, performing four or five concerts every night for three months, with the performances broadcast live transnationally. And their followers and fans donated what they could give, which turned out to be enormous. But the lesson to be learned is how this effort was different from the Live Aid of the 1980s; the artists collaborated with “highly organized urban poor groups,” according to Roces. “Aid was delivered not through mayors or even civil society. The food assistance was delivered by the poor who knew the poor […] and not a cent of the $2M was lost” (Roces).
Sruti Bala called for “turning limits into points of departure,” an act that is “less about a lens of perception but rather an argument about the modality and form of enacting the political […] not so much about discursive or epistemological truth claims and how they should be established but more about the ways in which this truth is told and performed and the importance of this form for remaking the self” (Bala).
Hunger poses a kind of material, structural imaginative limit to performance, yet, as hunger lurks everywhere […] in the shadows of debts, poverty, ecocide, agrarian crisis, wars, genocide, structural adjustment programs, it is equally important for us to recognize that the limits also need to be transformed into a point of departure of some kind. (Bala)
Bala hailed Anderson’s work helping community initiatives around policing in San Diego, USA, as one way forward. She also suggested performance studies, “in responding with care to the structural violence of hunger,” should turn to indigenous
ecological and social justice movements asserting food sovereignty, as seen in farmers’ protest in India and the Brazilian landless people’s movement and countless other ecological initiatives around the world […] [that already address] the question of collective custodianship and equitable distribution of food not only between humans but also with other sentient beings. (Bala)
But there is more to be said about this transformation of limits. As Bala said it, the form it takes, the “modality of enacting the political”, matters. Two poems converge in articulating this in terms of my main argument on the corporeality of hunger and the necessity of a materialist analysis and response. The first was shared by Swati Parashar: Sukanta Bhattacharya’s Hey Mahajibon (O Great Life!) and the second by Sruti Bala: a song by Sagar Gorkhe who is a member of the collective Kabir Kala Manch in India.
Bhattacharya’s poem is said to have been written as the poet’s response to the 1943 Bengal famine and expresses the poet’s “rage against poetry” because of his experience of the famine while doing relief work. “The time for poetry is gone, it says. The time for unadorned prose is come. Hunger dissolves all metaphor […]. In the realm of hunger, the world is prosaic. [To the poor], the full moon is like scalded bread” (Ipsita Chakravarty cited in Parashar).
Gorkhe’s song honours the memory of the sixteen migrant workers who were run over by a train in Maharashtra on 8 May 2020. The workers were walking the long way home (250 km) after a national lockdown was declared and stopped from exhaustion to rest on the rail tracks, thinking the trains had also stopped running. “Images of pieces of dry bread, roti, strewn on the tracks were particularly disconcerting. Bits of unpacked food that might have served as their next meal, remnants of their daily battle with hunger” […]. In Gorkhe’s song posted on YouTube, bread […] “grieves the death of the human caused by a combination of the deprivation of nourishment and systematic brutal negligence […] literally the moon of poetic imagination that has turned into scalded bread” (Bala). Poignantly, Theodor Adorno’s famous line comes to mind here: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (34).
“The time for poetry is gone.” “Hunger dissolves all metaphor.” “To the poor the moon is like scalded bread.” The image sears and leaves a wound that would not go away, like the scars of scalding in burn patients, if they survive the experience. This is perhaps the reason the conference advisory committee insisted against the “easy slippage to metaphor” in the discussion of hunger, because hunger is beyond metaphor or poetic language.
But, in ending this reflection, even the idea of slow thinking that counters the slow violence of hunger takes on a problematic twist for me. Slow thinking can be an act of co-action, co-performance with the hungry who can only think slowly, if at all, because of the physical regression of the body. From his immersive work in clinical settings, Patrick Anderson described what happens to the body deprived of food, whether from forced starvation or self-starvation:
[T]he symptomatic results of long-term hunger, long-term starvation, include […] the sort of breakdown of the sexual and reproductive functions of the body. They include the loss of hair and the growth of what is often described as baby hair. They include the loss of vision, and so a changed relationship to the world of visuality. They include the slow adsorption of fat cells used for energy which ends up wreaking havoc on the kidneys and liver and other gastrointestinal organs, and of particular interest is they can eventuate into the so-called Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, which means that the person who has been starving for long periods of time loses the ability to remember, developing both retrograde and anterograde amnesia, which is to say that they cannot remember events from the past and they cannot incorporate events from the present into memory, so a changed relationship to time and a separation from one’s own history and one’s own relationship to history. (Anderson, “Hunger and the response-ability of performance”)
In children 0–5 years of age, what happens is “stunting”, a condition of childhood malnutrition where children “[fail] to reach their growth potential as a result of disease, poor health and malnutrition […]. It affects both cognitive and physical development” (Ritchie).
The burning insight is that co-performative slow thinking with the hungry by the artist and academic happens only from a position of privilege of someone who does not experience long-term hunger. This awareness of a privileged position of thought and action must further complicate our response. Yet we must persist to ask: how can we help? And do hunger action. The PSi 2022 conference on hunger and these concurrent issues arising from the conference constitute a gesture of solidarity and activism on an issue we care about and that we are committed to pursue. There is no grand plan or a grand theory we are working from, only a desire to understand and to help, now tempered by an awareness of the risks this desire might activate. It might also turn out to be insignificant to the work of mitigating if not eliminating global hunger. It might not even save a single life. But we have a strong gut feeling that we need to do it. How can we not help?
[1] See the Acknowledgments at the bottom of this article for details on my collaborators at De La Salle University.
[2] Spatula&Barcode is the art collaborative duo of Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson. See an account of their work in the essay “Ampersand aesthetics: Spatula&Barcode’s Foodways Philippines.”
[3] See Richard Gough’s article that appears in both GPS and Performance Research with Enzo Cozzi’s 1999 essay reprinted within it, thanks to the generous permission from Routledge.
[4] See the list of members of the conference steering committee and advisory committee in the Acknowledgements. Their contribution to the thinking and labour on the conference call, design, and plan was crucial.
[5] This is my original English text; the published article is a Filipino translation by Christian Jil R. Benitez: “Kumukumpas ang katawan, at iyon lamang talaga. Isinasatunog nito ang sakit, pighati, sigasig, hindi mailalarawang palahaw, subalit nabibigong mabaligtad ang anuman. Hindi makananatili ang kumpas. Kumukupas ang tunog sa kawalan. . . . . Subalit ang pagtatanghal mismo ay isinasakatawan itong kawalan ng kakayahan upang sapat na makatugon sa kasaysayang malaon nang naganap, ang kawalan ng kakayahang maibalik ang panahon, ipanumbalik ang mga katawan at sagipin ang baryo mula sa sakuna” (Llana 46).
[6] Adrian Kear’s brief remarks as moderator in the keynote session are elaborated in his essay contribution “A different hunger: World spectatorship and the violence of representation” in this Performance Research issue.
[7] Patrick Anderson has a longer discussion of the points raised in the conference keynote session. Read his article in this Performance Research issue titled “Political paradigms of hunger: Force-feeding and the choreography of carceral power”.
[8] Alex and Precious have been cooking meals for disaster victims in the Philippines since 2013. See my article on the Art Relief Mobile Kitchen in this Performance Research issue.
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———. “Ampersand aesthetics: Spatula&Barcode’s Foodways Philippines.” GPS: Global Performance Studies, vol. 6, nos. 1–2, 2023, https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv6n1-2a132
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