This article offers a literary analysis of a prize-winning South African novel, Hunger Eats a Man (2015), by Nkosinathi Sithole. I analyse the political and cultural history and sexual politics represented in the novel by employing a theoretical nexus of precarity studies as it intersects with feminist, subaltern and postcolonial studies, enabling challenges to Eurocentric models of the precariat. I outline the conditions creating the precarity of certain characters, textually compared to slavery, and the effects of the economic gap between the black middle class and the desperately poor, rural slum-dwellers. Poverty and the abuse of women are both seen as forms of inadmissible exploitation in the novel, although the text refutes the possibility of a natural alliance between the struggles against the two forms of oppression. Using the theoretical work of Pumla Dineo Gqola on rape, I focus on voice, perspective, agency, subversion and resistance in examining the novel’s representations of sexual abuse, rape and violent retribution. I note the implications of the story-within-a-story revolutionary narrative about the starving poor occupying the homes of the wealthy. Finally, I analyse the effects of techniques that shape readers positively, offering an ethical dimension that allows for social change.

中文翻译：

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打破奴隶制的枷锁：恩科西纳提·西托勒的《饥饿吞噬人》中的不稳定、个人和政治

本文对 Nkosinathi Sithole 所著的南非获奖小说《饥饿吞噬男人》（2015 年）进行了文学分析。我通过使用不稳定研究的理论联系来分析小说中所代表的政治和文化历史以及性政治，因为它与女权主义、底层和后殖民研究相交叉，从而对欧洲中心主义的不稳定模型提出挑战。我概述了造成某些人物不稳定的条件，文字上与奴隶制相比，以及黑人中产阶级与极度贫困的农村贫民窟居民之间的经济差距的影响。贫穷和虐待妇女都被视为小说中不可接受的剥削形式，尽管文本驳斥了反对两种压迫形式的斗争之间自然联盟的可能性。使用 Pumla Dineo Gqola 关于强奸的理论工作，我在检查小说对性虐待、强奸和暴力报复的表现时，重点关注声音、视角、代理、颠覆和抵抗。我注意到关于饥饿的穷人占领富人的家园的故事中故事的革命性叙事的含义。最后，我分析了积极塑造读者的技术的影响，提供了一个允许社会变革的道德维度。