Refusal to Eat

"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