Summary:

Past famines evoke painful memories that individuals and societies may prefer to avoid. Famines are often associated with images of emaciated victims and dead bodies, reinforcing the association between famine, deprivation, and poverty. Such an association renders the remembrance of famine experiences undesirable. The memory of famine can be traumatic, and it is often viewed with a sense of shame. In this lecture, we will discuss about the collective remembering and/or forgetting of famines, focusing on the obstacles and drivers of famine commemoration.

Lecture slides: Famine and Heritage lecture.pptx

Additional/suggested readings

Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press.

Connerton, Paul. 2008. “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Memory Studies 1 (1): 59–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698007083889.

Corporaal, Marguérite, and Ingrid de Zwarte. 2022. “Heritages of Hunger: European Famine Legacies in Current Academic Debates.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 28 (1): 30–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2020.1869579.

Mwambari, David. 2023. “Vernacular Memories: Recalling Rwanda’s 1943–44 Famine during the Covid-19 Hunger Crisis.” Third World Quarterly 0 (0): 1–20.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2023.2167704.

Nweke, Obinna Chukwunenye. 2023. “Hunger as a Weapon of War: Biafra, Social Media and the Politics of Famine Remembrance.” Third World Quarterly, March, 1–18.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2023.2182283.

Useful websites

Heritages of Hunger research project at Radboud University: https://www.ru.nl/en/research/research-projects/heritages-of-hunger

Famines as mass atrocities: Reconsidering Violence, Memory and Justice in Relation to Hunger at the University of Gothenburg: https://www.gu.se/en/research/famines-as-mass-atrocities-reconsidering-violence-memory-and-justice-in-relation-to-hunger

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