Food culture and power in Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards | ||
| Journal of Languages and Translation | ||
| Article 5, Volume 10, Issue 1, January 2023, Pages 62-87 PDF (354.75 K) | ||
| Document Type: مقالات بحوث مبتکرة | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/jltmin.2023.277591 | ||
| Author | ||
| Rachel Raffat Zaki Awad | ||
| Department of English, Faculty of Al-Alsun (Languages), Minia University, Egypt | ||
| Abstract | ||
| This paper is a literary cultural study of food culture in Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards (1969), exposing how food culture wreaked havoc on the power relations at the time of the economic slump of the Great Depression years between 1929 and 1933. Taking Spivak’s theory of subalternity, Marxist theory, and Gramsci’s hegemony as the methodology to reread the play, this study attempts to find answers to these questions: how does food culture become a powerful lens that magnifies the intricate power relations between the capitalist elite and the subaltern proletariat inside the American food industry? How are the Brechtian technique and Marxist thought used as a vessel of both social and economic reform? How does Brecht seek to excavate the reasons behind hunger and social injustices by increasing the consciousness of the audience to participate, think, argue, and act? In addition, Brecht’s distanciation effect is described in this paper as a wake-up call to inspire the audiences to think, criticize, and then act. It also reminds the audiences that Capitalist economic mismanagement, class struggle, and practices of power over food distribution worsen the conditions of the poorer and mute their voices, transforming them into mere subalterns. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Brecht; Saint Joan of the Stockyards; Spivak; food culture; power; subalternity | ||
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