| Abstract
|
:
|
The Edible Complex: Postcolonial Narrative and the Politics of Eating analyzes literary texts from Ghana, India, Pakistan, and South Africa to argue that recurring scenes of eating across a wide body of postcolonial literature function as a fierce and specifically corporeal critique of the colonial and postcolonial nation-state. It examines resistant, willful, and deeply ambivalent acts of eating in postcolonial literature, emphasizing how the colonized subject at the most bodily level is often ambivalently caught between a desire for independence and the lure and lingering effects of colonial ideology. Arguing that postcolonial writers from diverse geographical and cultural perspectives use eating to link the physical body to the body politic at the level of the nutritive, The Edible Complex theorizes eating as an act of agency that both resists and negotiates oppressive political and ideological structures. This dissertation builds on existing theories of eating across the humanities and social sciences, including the works of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. It offers a new perspective on dominant readings of food in postcolonial literature, which tend to focus either on themes of starvation and scarcity in literatures of the third world, or on the relation between food and language as modes of articulation linked by and through the mouth. By turning away from food as an object and toward the embodied act of eating, it examines how postcolonial writers register its force and valence. By tracing the figure of eating across the works of Ama Ata Aidoo, Ismat Chughtai, J. M. Coetzee, Mahasweta Devi, M. K. Gandhi, and Sara Suleri, it argues that the subjugation of certain communities by others is normalized - and often legalized - through the same logic that dictates what and how we eat.
|