Hunger and Meaning in the Novels of Cristina García

This thesis offers a novel interpretation of the relationship between food and cultural memory starting from the concept of Gothic food and its relationship to colonialism. This work evolves from anthropologist Fernando Ortiz’s contribution to Cuban cultural memory and his metaphor of transculturación through Cuba’s national dish, the ajiaco. The ajiaco, a soup, will be considered in connection to slavery and forced labour on the sugar plantations in Cuba. It symbolises the amalgamation of all the different cultures that interacted on the island because of the colonisation of the indigenous populations and the slave trade starting from the arrival of Christopher Columbus. The Cuban food metaphor provides an opportunity to compare the different ways in which cultural memory operates and specifically how the metaphor has been translated outside of Cuba, through the work of Cuban-American diasporic writer Cristina García in the U.S.
The five García novels I have selected to be the focus of this study are: Dreaming in Cuban (1992), The Agüero Sisters (1997), Monkey Hunting (2003), The Lady Matador’s Hotel
(2010) and King of Cuba (2013). I consider these works to be representative of an idea of hunger that highlights the paradox of its contemporary attitudes to consumption and
globalisation in light of colonialism and its legacies. The five novels selected for analysis exemplify how, in the specific context of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and its aftermath, food and consumption are carriers of a notion of hunger which harbours the violence of colonialism revived by revolutionary upheaval.
The thesis introduces the original idea of “dark food”, exemplified by sugar, as a concept able to provide an insight into the legacies of slavery and its relationship to capitalism. The aim of this project is to recentre food in relation to models of memory that shed light on the negative consequences of globalization and capitalism. There is an infinite Western hunger for excess portrayed in García’s texts in contrast with the hunger for basic commodities in Cuba that provides the opportunity to discuss the conflation between an insatiable appetite and the losses caused by historical upheavals. The idea of dark food is to provide a lens through which it is possible to observe contrasts from a middle ground, a place that encapsulates how consumption can both passively and actively shed light on complex identitarian issues that allow for alternative interpretations of the past.