While at times he embraces deprivation as “estranging” and therefore

liberating, he also condemns the continuous logic between the state’s

disastrous scientific food rationing program and its increasingly severe
censorship of literature and the arts. For him, the arts are like “vitamins,”
necessary for feeding the revolutionary body and mind.
Chapters by Jessica Martell and Brooke Stanley also investigate modern
famines as governmentally managed, rather than environmental, phenomena,
in twentieth-century Irish and Bengali contexts, respectively. If
famines are a technology of imperial power, then food offers a vehicle for
critiquing that power’s “modernizing” programs, as do representations of
indigenous farming and eating practices that become modes of survival in
the face of structural immiseration. In “Potatoes and the Political Ecology
of James Joyce’s Dubliners,” Martell reads Joyce’s short story collection
ecologically by attending to the way its network of stories functions like
the botany of a potato plant: rhizomatically, through continued variation.
This literary internalization of the crop of the Irish Famine, she argues,
provides new resistant forms that enable Joyce as a colonial modernist
writer to refute imperial accounts of Irish dearth and depopulation.
Stanley’s chapter, “Paddy, Mangoes, and Molasses Scum: Food Regimes
and the Modernist Novel in The Tale of Hansuli Turn,” pushes the scope of
Modernism and Food Studies further east with its analysis of the impact of
global food regimes upon Bengali writer Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s
novel Hansuli Banker Upakathā. Stanley attends to Tarashankar’s “gastronomic
and stylistic superabundance” to locate literary sites of resistance
against uneven development. By working from Amartya Sen’s key insight
that, during India’s devastating famines in the 1940s, starvation resulted
from “some people not having enough to eat” rather than “there not being
enough food to eat,” Stanley complicates the reductive notion that
the global South experienced modernity as the West’s passive, long-suffering
breadbasket.