Today we often think of world hunger as a depoliticizing, sentimental concept, associated with charity singles such as Band-Aid and international food aid programs. This talk seeks to recover an alternate history of world hunger, tracing its development through anticolonial thought at the height of decolonization. Focusing on the work of Brazilian geography Josué de Castro, and his influence on anticolonial thinkers such as Franz Fanon and others, it will argue that hunger was central to a decolonial reimagining of the world in the decades after World War II.

Alys Moody is Associate Professor of Literature at Bard College, where she specialises in twentieth and twenty-first century European, American and world literature, with an emphasis on modernism and its contemporary and global heirs. She is the author of The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2018) and co-editor of the anthology Global Modernists on Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2020). She has also written on literature and contemporary art, including a book chapter ‘Against Culinary Art: Mina Loy and the Modernist Starving Artist’ in Gastro-Modernism: Food, Literature, Culture.

To receive the link to this online lecture, please sign up to our mailing list:docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfi6nlqDy60GQ4Ik44Ny5X_mlIeiua35m3kqQDTXIIscUmXBQ/viewform