Hungry; or, human?

Manisha Basu introduces the The Aesthetics and Politics of Global Hunger with the established claim that under the auspices of the kind of modernity espoused by imperial Britain of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to have a population that was hungry was to admit to a state that could not protect its citizens. She contributes to this line of argument by showing that not only could states located outside such modernity not protect their citizens from hunger, they could not in fact form them as human. Hunger then became tied to those lands and peoples ostensibly still awaiting their humanization. Consequently, who or what constitutes a human came to be understood in relation to how hunger was distributed among asymmetrically related national populations.