Famine - A Crisis of History and Rhetoric

This work examines how famine memory is used in conceptualizing various modes of subjecthood. It traces both the changing and repetitive registers that the Western notion of famine has taken as ways to narrate the poor and the notion of humanitarianism. Using late nineteenth-century Bengal as an example, I will show how morality, land economics and liberal science has served as vehicles for generating a normalized, axiomatic notion of what it means to be charitable and for constituting different historical Others in the process. The significance of this is to raise broader questions of how famine memory might inflect our response to suffering.