Fasting, feasting: The resistant strategies of (not) eating in Ananda Devi's Le Voile de Draupadi and Manger l'autre

Abstract

Abstract This article explores representations of fasting and feasting in Le Voile de Draupadi (1993) and Manger l'autre (2018) by contemporary Francophone Mauritian author, Ananda Devi, teasing out the resistant strategies of (not) eating to the power dynamics entrenched within her global, postcolonial settings in which the politics of gender, neo-colonialism and advanced capitalist consumer culture compete in the regulatory domination of the individual body. Reading these two novels together offers space for reflection on the different meanings – psychical, familial, religious, cultural, political, historical – that converge on the bodies of her protagonists, and the ways that these meanings may exceed singular or conventional interpretations of both fasting and feasting. Written 25 years apart, and set in different locations, one in Mauritius, the second in an unnamed although recognizably western nation, Devi's novels speak to one another across these spaces, tracing the global flows of attitudes towards the body and practices of consumption. In so doing, Devi's writing illuminates the embedded, crisscrossing power dynamics and layered drives exhibited by these fasting, feasting bodies, and their divergent – but resonant – strategies of resistance in the practices of (not) eating across the contemporary, globalized world.