Music and the politics of famine: everyday discourses and shame for suffering

Understanding the politics of famine is crucial to understanding why famines still occur. A key part of this is how famine is remembered, understood, and discussed. This paper focuses on songs popular among communities that have recently experienced deadly famine. Contemporary famines almost always manifest in armed conflict contexts, where there is limited political freedom. Here, songs and music can be an important way to debate sensitive political issues. This paper focuses on the way that songs and music shape ‘regimes of truth’ around famine, and who is shamed and held accountable for associated suffering. It is based on long-term ethnographic research, the recordings of famine-related songs, and collaborative analysis in Jonglei and Warrap States (South Sudan) in 2021–24. The paper shows how songs can mock soldiers for their seizing of assets during times of hunger and how they can create familial shame for famine suffering, shifting responsibility away from the real causes to family members.