With the media portraying Africa with persistent and pervasive images of emaciated and starving Africans and the urgent need to mobilize food aid in response, Hungry Subjects places Africa's anxiety about food in a broader historical context and expands the scope of ongoing food studies beyond its current boundaries in the social sciences.Njeri Githiri weaves texts of maturity across the African literary landscape and the African diaspora in English, French, and Portuguese to ask how African writers incorporate food into their stories to convey cultural information, question norms, and suggest alternatives.
Eating is an intimate, personal but fundamentally social experience, codified through public ritual and commerce, and always connected to a larger fabric of historical, cultural, economic and political dynamics.By delving into the political dynamics of food as an instrument of power and control along with its subversive potential, Hungry People assesses the narrative and political orientation of (non-)eating and exposes the ways in which postcolonial manifestations of colonial-era power relations are encoded in food's multiple functions and meanings.
