A Different Hunger: World spectatorship and the violence of representation

In echoing the title of A. Sivanadan’s seminal examination of Black cultural-political strategies of resistance to the representational violence governing the construction of colonial identities and power relations, this article argues that the racialized regime of representation continues to support the social production of global hunger and sustain its operation. In this context, hunger must be seen as an act of exteriorized violence directed against specific populations in order to maintain the necropolitical neo-colonial settlement. Within the aesthetic logic of humanitarianism supporting this regime, the emaciated figure of the suffering, silent other is continually forced to re-enact the traumatic scene of their own disappearance into the space of the image in order to fulfil a spectatorial desire to see and to be subjectivated through seeing. The article contends that the social construction of an intrinsically theatricalized humanitarian gaze is inimical to the political functioning of colonial-capitalist ways of seeing, thereby demonstrating that critical art practices are not exempt from operating within the parameters of this aesthetic regime.

The article investigates the claims of Dutch artist Renzo Martens’ performative documentary, Episode III: Enjoy poverty (2008), to expose the hypocrisy of Western food aid practices through the lens of performative intervention. Through close analysis of the film, it cautions against positioning hunger as an object ‘outside’ reflexive critical consideration of it. It demonstrates that there is no external material reality that pre-exists our imagination and desire to know; no objective correlate for our hunger for social and political change. In order to understand this ‘different hunger’, we must recognise our differential implication in, and relation to, the world in which hunger is manifest and not construct an idealised optic that would allow us to simply imagine ourselves acting upon it.