Research Project Alys Moody Apocalypse of the Starving: World Hunger, World Literature, and the Idea of the World, 1945–1990

Between the end of World War II and the end of the Cold War, in a context of decolonization and rapidly transforming global relations, world hunger emerged as a new idea: the belief that hunger anywhere in the world was the responsibility of the whole world. This new notion of world hunger was often conceptualized in this period through an apocalyptic imaginary, which suggested that widespread hunger and mulnutrition around the world would produce (or was producing) devastating social and political collapse. This vision of world hunger as a looming apocalypse produced an array of solutions that called for practical, infrastructural, affective, and conceptual transformations in how we imagined the world as such—what forms of relation and organization would and should constitute the global—as a way of imagining how best to respond to this looming disaster. Examining how literature and other texts participated in developing an apocalyptic vision of world hunger, this project asks how the simultaneous development of world hunger and world literature in this period mobilized an apocalyptic imaginary. As we enter a new period of global crisis, this project seeks to reanimate the global as a site for political action that can respond to the threat of worldwide apocalypse.