Introduction: Living on the Edge

Abstract

Through a series of case studies spanning the bounds of literature, photography, essay, and manifesto, this book examines the ways in which literary texts do theoretical, ethical, and political work. The project approaches the relationship between literature, theory, and public life through a specific site, the French Antilles, and focuses on two mutually elucidating terms: hunger and irony. Reading hunger and irony together helps clarify irony’s creative potential and limitations. If hunger gives irony purchase by anchoring it in particular historical and material conditions, irony also gives a literature of hunger a means to move beyond a given situation, to interrupt the inertia of historical determination.