A Different Hunger: World spectatorship and the violence of representation

In echoing the title of A. Sivanadan’s (1991) examination of Black cultural-political strategies of resistance to the ‘epistemic violence’ (Fanon 1986) governing the construction of colonial identities and power relations, this essay argues that the racialized regime of representation continues to support the social production of global hunger and sustain its operation.

It examines how the biopolitics of food security and distribution practices serve to ‘endorse the permanent state of emergency that enables the world to continue as it is’ (Edkins 2019); with established ways of seeking to end hunger effectively functioning to ensure its reproduction. In this context, it argues that hunger must be seen as an act of exteriorized violence directed against specific populations in order to maintain the necropolitical neo-colonial settlement, producing hunger and famine as a ‘permanent emergency’ enabling global governmentality and the reproduction of an inside/outside topographical binary. Within this ‘theatre of appearing’, the emaciated figure of the suffering, silent other seems be continually forced to re-enact and ‘relive the traumatic scene’ (Mbembe 2017) 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.

How can a cultural politics of hunger activism disrupt this scene, and resist the theatrical regime of representation which it supports and sustains? How can performance de-centre the spectator’s frame? It is important to caution against positioning hunger as an object ‘outside’ reflexive critical consideration of it. There is no simple ‘out there’ of material reality that pre-exists our imagination and desire to know; no objective correlate for our hunger for political and social change. In order to understand this ‘different hunger’, we must recognise that academics, artists and activists are part of the world, not separate from it – and we cannot hold the world at a remove from us as either object of study or theatrical mise-en-scène.