Description
Book SynopsisThe first global history of hunger strikes as a tactic in prisons, conflicts, and protest movements. The power of the hunger strike lies in its utter simplicity. The ability to choose to forego eating is universally accessible, even to those living under conditions of maximal constraint, as in the prisons of apartheid South Africa, Israeli prisons for Palestinian prisoners, and the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. It is a weapon of the weak, potentially open to all. By choosing to hunger strike, a prisoner wields a last-resort personal power that communicates viscerally, in a way that is undeniableespecially when broadcast over prison barricades through media and to movements outside. Refusal to Eat is the first book to compile a global history of this vital form of modern protest, the hunger strike. In this enormously ambitious but concise book, Nayan Shah observes how hunger striking stretches and recasts to turn a personal agony into a collective social agony in conflicts a
Trade Review"Shah recognises that the hunger strike is a nonviolent performance that reconnects the prisoner to her community and to the world of journalism and public debate. But it is also a weapon that can transform the vulnerable and disempowered body of the captive into a remarkably effective instrument in a war for legitimacy. . . . Reaching beyond the prison wall, the voice of the hunger striker implicates us all in its challenge to decide what world we seek to inhabit." * Irish Times *
“The hunger strike’s significance lies in allowing captives and outsiders to disturb the carceral system’s control of space and time. These graphic, saddening stories are uncomfortable to read, but they are crucial to understanding that often complex dynamic.” * Times Literary Supplement *
"The real originality of
Refusal to Eat rests in its exploration of lesser-known hunger strikes. . . . There is much value in bringing all these hunger strikes together. Doing so renders visible many common threads in hunger strikers’ experience, and also their management by doctors’ governments across multiple geographical, historical and conflict contexts.
Refusal to Eat speaks to a broad audience, having much to say to bioethicists as well as historians. . . . [and] both academic and non-scholarly audiences." * Journal of Social History *
"Shah’s book amplifies important voices and expands the arsenal of evidence that can be used to interrogate and dismantle carceral systems." * Punishment and Society *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations vii
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Hunger Striking in the Crisis of Imperial Democracy
1 • Suffragists and the Shaping of Hunger Striking
2 • The Medical Ethics of Forcible Feeding and a Brief History of Four Objects
3 • Irish Republicans Innovating Hunger Strikes for Anticolonial Rebellion
4 • Gandhi's Fasts, Prisoner Hunger Strikes, and Indian Independence
Part Two: Hunger Striking and Democratic Upheavals
5 • Solidarity and Survival in the Tule Lake Stockade
6 • South African Anti-apartheid Hunger Strikes
7 • Controversies of Medical Intervention in Northern Ireland
8 • Biomedical Technologies, Medical Ethics, and the Management of Hunger Strikers
9 • Australian Refugee Detention, Trauma, and Mental Health Crisis
10 • Captives in U.S. Detention and Their Networks of Resistance and Solidarity
Conclusion: Hunger-Striking Contingencies
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
