(Trans-)national hunger: Cold war famine iconographies in the United States

Abstract

This chapter analyzes visual representations of U.S.-American hunger circulated in the context of an anti-hunger campaign in the late 1960s. It demonstrates how visual references to the so-called famine iconography, which depicts a starving child with a bloated belly, both challenged and reinforced Cold War dichotomies between what was termed the “First World” and the “Third World.” In a complex and nuanced move, these photographs strategically enmesh transnational and national(ist) aesthetics and politics of hunger. The Cold War famine iconography thus questioned the moral and social superiority of U.S.-American democratic capitalism and at the same time mobilized notions of U.S. exceptionalism to argue for national social reform.