Politics and Aesthetics in the Realm of Hunger

This essay considers Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts as a meditation on imperial biopolitics in addition to treating the study as a provocation for thinking about the relationship between colonial history – specifically the history of famines – and the domain of aesthetics. In the first section, the essay reads Davis’s study as a historical supplement to Michel Foucault’s abstract speculations on the relationship of race and racism to imperialism. In so doing, it not only grounds Foucault’s insights into the concrete field of history but also highlights the significance of colonial famines and attendant deaths in the process of imperial subjects. The second section of the essay takes up the category of the ‘aesthetics of hunger’ framed by the Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha to examine Bengali ghost stories. It argues for thinking about these stories, replete with agential ghosts, as both a literary registration and a determinate negation, of the experience of hunger and death in colonial Bengal.