Many of us have never experienced the persistent and unrelenting pangs of sustained hunger. This was not the case for previous generations, who not only spent most of their waking hours cultivating and preparing food but also faced the imminent uncertainty of crop failures, food shortages, and general resource scarcity. And yet, for our ancestors, hunger was more than just a physiological state—it was also imbued with social, cultural, and divine meanings. Across the northeastern borderlands of what is now the United States, hunger shaped history.
In Violent Appetites, Dr. Carla Cevasco offers a groundbreaking cultural history of hunger within the context of eighteenth-century settler colonial projects across the northern borderlands of the United States and Canada. Cevasco introduces readers to the frameworks of “hunger cultures” and “hunger knowledges,” which encompass the range of cultural coping mechanisms that Indigenous peoples and European colonizers mobilized in response to the material...
University of California Press