Abstract

Representing Hunger

In Global Performance Studies

Deliberate Starvation: Hunger artists in Kafka, Różewicz, and Sinking Ship
Stefano Boselli

A Comparative Study of Hunger and Satiation of Hunger in the Literary Works of M.T. Vasudevan Nair and Perumal Murugan
Maya Vinai and S. M. Mithuna

Internal Workshop: The Third Theatre Methodology of Embodying Hunger
Sandip Debnath

In Performance Research

A Different Hunger: World spectatorship and the violence of representation
https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2023.2363651

As discussed in the opening section, the putative unrepresentability of hunger, like the putative unrepresentability of pain, is a point that is affirmed and/or contested by our contributors. Looking at works for the stage and the page, our writers consider cases in Asia, Europe and North America that have tried to (re)present hunger for their audiences.

Through the examination of two stage adaptations of Kafka’s short story “A Hunger Artist”, Boselli demonstrates that hunger can become a performance, even in a fundamentally static situation, because of the power differential between the starving artists themselves and the well-fed spectators.

Maya Vinai and S. M. Mithuna explore the representation of memories of hunger among the rural agrarian communities in India and the role that mothers play in mitigating hunger and creating a feeling of illusory self-sufficiency (of food) among children. Using the works of three Indian authors, they argue that memories of hunger and dearth are forged not just by the physical lack of food but by the experiences of lack of social security and the denial of identity.

Sandip Debnath builds on his experiences with Third Theatre to suggest that a strategy for representing hunger is not to enact but to react. This gives Third Theatre activists an avenue for communicating hunger while remaining critically and politically aware of the acuteness of the absence. Such representations, he contends, do not generate reactions of pity and fear but rather of resistance.

Adrian Kear suggests that a racialized regime of representation continues to support the social production of global hunger and sustain its operation. Kear asks, how can a cultural politics of hunger activism disrupt this scene, and resist the theatrical regime of representation that it supports and sustains? And he asks us to move from Rob Nixon’s “slow violence” towards enacting Jenny Edkins’ “slow justice”.