World Hunger, World Literature
Imagining the World from Decolonization to Third World Feminism

Between the 1940s and the 1980s,  as colonial empires collapsed and political ideologies fought for ascendency, the question of what “the world” would look like—what forms of relation and organization would and should constitute the global—was a site of intense contestation and struggle. This project argues that the concepts of world hunger and world literature as they developed in the decades after World War II are both products of this broader struggle over how to imagine global relation. Reading them together—reading world literature’s attempts to represent and intervene in discourses about world hunger—allows us to see how global culture and economic inequality were thought together at successive points in this struggle. It thus offers both a history of how we came to the forms of the global that we now take for granted, and a set of models for developing a new theory of global cultural relation in an unequal world. In so doing, it can help us to recover a now-lost optimism for the potential of the world as a site of political action and engagement.

Drawing on archival work on the publishing networks that produced world literature in this period, this book charts the negotiations and conflicts produced by the circulation of Third World writing in the cultural institutions of the First World, moving from decolonial modernism to 1980s Third World feminism. Chapters range widely across Caribbean, African, Latin American, and South Asian writing, and include work on Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon and Josué de Castro; the Bengali Hungry Generation and their engagement with the US Beats; political narratives about Communist China by Eileen Chang and William Hinton; Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Dambduzo Marechera in the African Writers’ Series; Tsitsi Dangarembga and British feminist publishing; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s translations of Mahasweta Devi.