Against the backdrop of media representations of Africa through persistent and pervasive images of emaciated, starving Africans and the critical need to marshall food aid in response, Hungry Subjects places Africa’s food anxiety within a broader historical context and expands ongoing food scholarship beyond its current confines in the social sciences. Njeri Githire weaves together coming-of-age texts across the African and African diasporic literary landscape in English, French, and Portuguese expression to ask how African writers incorporate food into their storylines to transmit cultural information, question norms, and propose alternatives. Eating is an intimately personal yet inherently social experience codified by public rituals and commerce, invariably linked to a larger tapestry of historical, cultural, economic, and political dynamics. Delving into the political dynamics of food as a tool of power and control alongside subversive potentialities, Hungry Subjects appraises the narrative and political thrust of (not-)eating and exposes the ways in which postcolonial manifestations of colonial-era power relations are symbolized in food’s many functions and meanings. 

Njeri Githire is Associate Professor of African American & African Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. 

Table of Contents      
                                                                                                                                     
Acknowledgments
Introduction 
Chapter I: Fed Up: Subversive Appetites & Deliberately Feminist Acts of Resistance.
Chapter II: Pig Tales and Cannibal Repasts: Eating the Other; the Other Eating.
Chapter III: Mapping/Counter-Mapping National Landscapes À La Carte
Chapter IV: Dis(h)coursing the Nation: Culinary Geographies & Gustatory Landscapes Reimagined
Chapter V: In/edible Geographies: Remapping Cartographies of Un/belonging
Coda
Bibliography