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

1/nAbstract/nStarving from Satiety: Explorations of Uncommon Hunger in Twentieth-Century African/nAmerican Literature/nby/nGabrielle Melanie Williams/nDoctor of Philosophy in African American Studies/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor Darieck Scott, Chair/n“Starving from Satiety: Explorations of Uncommon Hunger in Twentieth-Century African/nAmerican Literature,” is a dissertation that mounts qualitative examination of the critical import/nof illustrations of alimentation, eating, and hunger in seminal novels of the African American/nliterary canon. Informed by my specialization in interdisciplinary areas of African American/nStudies, African Diaspora Studies, and Food Studies, “Starving from Satiety” comprises three/nmain chapters that take a range of methodological approaches to analysis of interplays between/nfood and sensory experience in scenes from novels by Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were/nWatching God (1937)), Toni Morrison (Beloved (1987)), and, Richard Wright (Native Son/n(1940))./nLargely drawing from approaches in existential phenomenology, post-structuralism, and poststructural/nliterary theory, “Starving from Satiety” explores instances of what I term “uncommon/nhunger” in novels under review. “Uncommon hunger” refers to occurrences of characters’ odd/ncravings for and/or interactions with food. Insofar as I closely read occurrences of “uncommon/nhunger” depicted in scenes from novels supporting “Starving from Satiety’s” explicatory aims, it/nserves as a unit of analysis to aide theorizations contending that characters’ odd relationships to/nfood are not odd at all when we critically consider how these relationships are conditioned by the/nequally odd (actually, inhumane) lives that they are portrayed to live./nIn other words, selected novels in “Starving from Satiety” share in featuring black or Negro/ncharacters living in slave, post-slave, or disenfranchised circumstances in anti-black racist U.S./nenvirons. In different ways, these characters pursue grossly restricted lives where they either do/nnot own, or feel that they do not own their bodies, and, therefore (if you will), their bellies. In/nthis way, I contend that in scenes where Hurston, Morrison, and/or Wright portray characters/nrelating to food in “uncommon” ways, each author provides opportunities to analyze such/nportrayals vis-à-vis “uncommon hunger.” Correspondingly, my theorizations follow a broadly/nsyllogistic route of probing: If one lives a life that is uncommon, then one’s practices of/nalimentation, eating, and hungering will be commensurately uncommon./nHence, my dissertation aspires to stoke interest in exploring explicit reasons that characters/nconditioned by highly restrictive lives might set conditions for processes of appetite and eating/n2/nthat are, proportionally, highly restrictive; so much so that in their “uncommon” treatment of/nfood they seem to risk starvation by missing-the-mark of quotidian gustatory/nconsumption/production processes. Yet, it may be the case that characters in novels such as,/nBeloved, Native Son, and, Their Eyes Were Watching God risk common starvation to gain/n“uncommon” brands of agency. Or, said differently, vis-à-vis the lens of “uncommon hunger”/ncan we glean the possibility that characters depicted in these novels physically relate to food in/nodd, ostensibly malnourishing ways to access metaphysical forms of nourishment such as, for/nexample, catharsis, self-determination, or sovereignty that sate them far more than common/nrations to which they have little to no autonomous access on public/private fronts? Ultimately,/n“Starving from Satiety: Explorations of Uncommon Hunger in Twentieth-Century African/nAmerican Literature” seeks not only to explore, but also to redress this question.

Advisor: Scott, Darieck B