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  • Editor’s Note
  • Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio)

Homer said hunger is insolent—and will be fed. Aristophanes commented that it has no friend but its feeder. And Benjamin Franklin quipped that it is the best pickle.

The aim of this issue is not to retrace hunger’s figurative and referential trail across history, but to establish a discursive space for the topic in our present critical climate. Given that an estimated 925 million people in the world suffer from hunger, that is, 13.6 percent of the world population, the topic has an urgency beyond mere theoretical concern—it is one which impacts many lives, particularly in developing countries. Of the estimated undernourished, just over 2 percent come from developed countries, whereas 4 percent come from the Near East and North Africa, 6 percent from Latin America and the Caribbean, 26 percent from Sub-Saharan Africa, and 63 percent from Asia and the Pacific.

The eleven essays in our focus on hunger take us into the literature and film of both developed and developing countries. They challenge us with questions such as whether hunger is sign of our humanity or animality? Who is the paradigmatic subject of hunger? Is its meaning transhistorical and transcultural? Or is it imbued in ideology and thus irremediably discursive and historically contingent? Whose hunger is acknowledged and whose is ignored? Is it a metaphysical desire (the hunger for recognition) or a biological need (the hunger for food)? Is hunger a global problem to be eradicated, or a perpetual reminder of our embodiment and exposure to others? Can an inquiry into hunger ever be disentangled from biopolitics? Can we speak of both an aesthetics of hunger and a hunger for aesthetics? Is intellectual hunger a desire for disciplinarity, a taste for theory? Hunger has the capacity to reshape our critical climate in a very important way—or, as the novelist Maxine Hong Kingston put it, “Hunger also changes the world—when eating can’t be a habit, then neither can seeing.” [End Page 5]

Currently, two issues are in preparation. The first issue is entitled Violence (Vol. 20, Nos. 1–2 (2012)). Contributions to this issue will engage the diverse and potentially paradoxical relations among violence, politics, and ethics. What form does violence take in philosophy and the arts (including but not limited to literature, film, music, and painting)? Does globalization enable a different understanding of violence, that is, an alternative way of imagining the subject and object of violence? Can we conceive of a violence /of/ philosophy, /of/ language and meaning? How might violence be negotiated vis-à-vis discourses of resistance, commodification, or subjectification? With regard to ineffable effects of dominance and aggression, along with various re-presentations and repetitions of arbitrary violence, can and how might violence be productively, even progressively, reinscribed and rethought? Does violence have a history? Submission deadline: closed.

The second issue under preparation is entitled Critical Climate (Vol. 21, No. 1 (2013)). Welcome are contributions that critically explore the discursive shape and texture of what we call climate change. Specifically, we begin with the premise that climate change asks of cultural theorists nothing more or less than a re-evaluation of ourselves, even while it challenges us to put to use the critical tools we have to hand. We ask: How do critical concepts like power, ideology, mediation, capital, colonialism, gender, oppression, society, and construction help us to understand the challenges presented by climate change? Does the current crisis wrought by anthropogenic climate change defy or affirm the assumptions that underpin cultural critical theory—and to what extent? Can we respond—and, if so, how—through now established critical modes, such as those signaled by deconstruction, post-structuralism, genre theory, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and science studies, or those practiced under the rubrics of, among others, Agamben, Badiou, Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Latour, and Žižek? Or does climate change demand a new kind of theory? Submission deadline: 31 December 2011.

Finally, I would like to thank the contributors to this issue for sharing their work on hunger with us. The genesis of this issue was a highly successful panel sponsored by the Society for Critical Exchange at the annual...

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