During the famine that befell China following the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, hunger was a major affliction for the individuals undergoing reform in the labor camps. Food – in terms of procurement, consumption, or just discursive recollection – was a central issue in the prisoners’ lives and, as a consequence, descriptions of meals and eating practices are a recurring presence in modern Chinese literary texts that revolve around carceral experiences. This contribution investigates three literary works that reconstruct personal experiences of imprisonment by way of eating: Wang Ruowang’s Hunger Trilogy (1980), Zhang Xianliang’s Mimosa (1984), and Yang Xianhui’s Chronicles of Jiabiangou (2003). In these texts, food becomes a privileged perspective through which look at how personal and collective memories are re-appropriated and re-elaborated, as well as to analyze how narratives of the past are consumed and produced.
Stockholm University, Sweden - ORCID: 0000-0002-1355-9597
Titolo del capitolo
Eat to remember. Gastronomical reconfigurations of hunger and imprisonment in contemporary Chinese literature
Autori
Serena De Marchi
Lingua
English
DOI
10.36253/978-88-5518-506-6.12
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Anno di pubblicazione
2021
Copyright
© 2021 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Titolo del libro
Food issues 食事
Sottotitolo del libro
Interdisciplinary Studies on Food in Modern and Contemporary East Asia
Curatori
Miriam Castorina, Diego Cucinelli
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Numero di pagine
202
Anno di pubblicazione
2021
Copyright
© 2021 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Editore
Firenze University Press
DOI
10.36253/978-88-5518-506-6
ISBN Print
978-88-5518-505-9
eISBN (pdf)
978-88-5518-506-6
eISBN (epub)
978-88-5518-507-3
Collana
Studi e saggi
ISSN della collana
2704-6478
e-ISSN della collana
2704-5919