Hungry Subjects
Mapping Appetites in the African Cultural Landscape
Interrogating the plate, palate, and African literary imagination of food and eating
Description
Against the backdrop of media representations of Africa through persistent and pervasive images of emaciated, starving Africans and the critical need to marshall food aid in response, Hungry Subjects places Africa’s food anxiety within a broader historical context and expands ongoing food scholarship beyond its current confines in the social sciences. Njeri Githire weaves together coming-of-age texts across the African and African diasporic literary landscape in English, French, and Portuguese expression to ask how African writers incorporate food into their storylines to transmit cultural information, question norms, and propose alternatives. Eating is an intimately personal yet inherently social experience codified by public rituals and commerce, invariably linked to a larger tapestry of historical, cultural, economic, and political dynamics. Delving into the political dynamics of food as a tool of power and control alongside subversive potentialities, Hungry Subjects appraises the narrative and political thrust of (not-)eating and exposes the ways in which postcolonial manifestations of colonial-era power relations are symbolized in food’s many functions and meanings.
Njeri Githire is Associate Professor of African American & African Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
Reviews
“Intellectually nourishing and deliciously interdisciplinary, Hungry Subjects: Mapping Appetites in the African Cultural Landscape, recognizes, legitimates and affirms the historical, cartographic, gendered, and sociopolitical textures of food culture as a node of storytelling in canonical and contemporary literary texts. Complicating materialist and symbolic readings of (not) eating and agency, Githire critically engages a movable feast of culinary storylines, traversing popular and traditional cultures in Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone spaces to offer a rich comparison of the discursive dimensions of food in African and diasporic literatures.”
- Polo Moji, University of Cape Town
“Njeri Githire’s Hungry Subjects provides an incisive account of how food and eating (or not eating) in postcolonial African literatures is a locus for exploring intimate, embodied, and relentlessly gendered forms of oppression and resistance. Impressively working across Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone literary traditions from across the African continent and its diaspora, the book attends to food and eating in the full complexity of their material and symbolic registers.”
- Katherine Hallemeier, University of Geneva
“In Hungry Subjects, Njeri Githire has written a book that truly maps appetites in the African cultural landscape. The scope of the book is wondrously diverse, drawing together African writers writing in English, French, and Portuguese, and using a multiplicity of African languages, to describe foods, foodways, food hierarchies, food obsessions, and aversions. The role of food in nation-building, in gender relations, and in immigrant identity all figure prominently. One of the strengths of the book is the sheer number of writers Githire discusses, all of whom are wrestling with the concept of food as power and food as mnemonic.”
- Jonathan Bishop Highfield, Rhode Island School Design