Starving from Satiety: Explorations of Uncommon Hunger in Twentieth-Century African American Literature

1AbstractStarving from Satiety: Explorations of Uncommon Hunger in Twentieth-Century AfricanAmerican LiteraturebyGabrielle Melanie WilliamsDoctor of Philosophy in African American StudiesUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Darieck Scott, Chair“Starving from Satiety: Explorations of Uncommon Hunger in Twentieth-Century AfricanAmerican Literature,” is a dissertation that mounts qualitative examination of the critical importof illustrations of alimentation, eating, and hunger in seminal novels of the African Americanliterary canon. Informed by my specialization in interdisciplinary areas of African AmericanStudies, African Diaspora Studies, and Food Studies, “Starving from Satiety” comprises threemain chapters that take a range of methodological approaches to analysis of interplays betweenfood and sensory experience in scenes from novels by Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes WereWatching God (1937)), Toni Morrison (Beloved (1987)), and, Richard Wright (Native Son(1940)).Largely drawing from approaches in existential phenomenology, post-structuralism, and poststructuralliterary theory, “Starving from Satiety” explores instances of what I term “uncommonhunger” in novels under review. “Uncommon hunger” refers to occurrences of characters’ oddcravings for and/or interactions with food. Insofar as I closely read occurrences of “uncommonhunger” depicted in scenes from novels supporting “Starving from Satiety’s” explicatory aims, itserves as a unit of analysis to aide theorizations contending that characters’ odd relationships tofood are not odd at all when we critically consider how these relationships are conditioned by theequally odd (actually, inhumane) lives that they are portrayed to live.In other words, selected novels in “Starving from Satiety” share in featuring black or Negrocharacters living in slave, post-slave, or disenfranchised circumstances in anti-black racist U.S.environs. In different ways, these characters pursue grossly restricted lives where they either donot own, or feel that they do not own their bodies, and, therefore (if you will), their bellies. Inthis way, I contend that in scenes where Hurston, Morrison, and/or Wright portray charactersrelating to food in “uncommon” ways, each author provides opportunities to analyze suchportrayals vis-à-vis “uncommon hunger.” Correspondingly, my theorizations follow a broadlysyllogistic route of probing: If one lives a life that is uncommon, then one’s practices ofalimentation, eating, and hungering will be commensurately uncommon.Hence, my dissertation aspires to stoke interest in exploring explicit reasons that charactersconditioned by highly restrictive lives might set conditions for processes of appetite and eating2that are, proportionally, highly restrictive; so much so that in their “uncommon” treatment offood they seem to risk starvation by missing-the-mark of quotidian gustatoryconsumption/production processes. Yet, it may be the case that characters in novels such as,Beloved, Native Son, and, Their Eyes Were Watching God risk common starvation to gain“uncommon” brands of agency. Or, said differently, vis-à-vis the lens of “uncommon hunger”can we glean the possibility that characters depicted in these novels physically relate to food inodd, ostensibly malnourishing ways to access metaphysical forms of nourishment such as, forexample, catharsis, self-determination, or sovereignty that sate them far more than commonrations to which they have little to no autonomous access on public/private fronts? Ultimately,“Starving from Satiety: Explorations of Uncommon Hunger in Twentieth-Century AfricanAmerican Literature” seeks not only to explore, but also to redress this question