Books by Nayan Shah

"Providing a gripping historical account of hunger strikes over the past century, Nayan Shah sheds light on the paradox of using the frailty of the human body as a political weapon, showing how strikers slowly kill themselves in order to secure a series of rights and political goals. Refusal to Eat is as riveting as it is illuminating."--Neve Gordon, coauthor of Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire "This sweeping account of the hunger strike as form of geopolitical protest manages to be both a total history and a primer for contemporary activism. Nayan Shah materializes the agony of embodied suffering and the global consequences of the refusal to eat in a truly devastating, inspiring, read."--Antoinette Burton, coeditor of Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times "In this global study of the use of the hunger strike over the course of the twentieth century--by suffragists, Irish republicans, Japanese American internees, Indian decolonial activists, South African anti-apartheid activists, and more--Shah offers an affecting analysis of an embodied political weapon of last resort and a meditation on the nature of modern state and carceral power and resistance to it."--Regina Kunzel, author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality "A true tour de force. Shah's writing is clear and accessible and simultaneously engages with high-level critical discourse; it invites the reader, no matter one's background, into a serious and sustained study of hunger striking and the marginalized subjects who practice it. I really cannot heap sufficient praise on this work."--Patrick Anderson, author of So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance

In exploring an array of intimacies between global migrants Nayan Shah illuminates a stunning, transient world of heterogeneous social relations-dignified, collaborative, and illicit. At the same time he demonstrates how the United States and Canada, in collusion with each other, actively sought to exclude and dispossess nonwhite races. Stranger Intimacy reveals the intersections between capitalism, the state's treatment of immigrants, sexual citizenship, and racism in the first half of the twentieth century.