REFUSAL TO EAT

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By choosing to hunger strike, a prisoner makes a crisis and, more than that, embodies the crisis

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 and contexts all around the world, laying out a remarkable number of case studies over the last century and more. From suffragettes in Britain and the US in the early twentieth century to Irish political prisoners, Bengali prisoners, and detainees at post-9/11 Guantánamo Bay; from Japanese Americans in US internment camps to conscientious objectors in the 1960s; from South Africans fighting apartheid to asylum seekers in Australia and Papua New Guinea, Shah shows the importance of context for each case and the interventions the protesters faced. The power that hunger striking unleashes is volatile, unmooring all previous resolves, certainties, and structures and forcing supporters and opponents alike to respond in new ways. It can upend prison regimens, medical ethics, power hierarchies, governments, and assumptions about gender, race, and the body's endurance. This book takes hunger strikers seriously as decision-makers in desperate situations, often bound to disagree or fail, and captures the continued frustration of authorities when confronted by prisoners willing to die for their positions. Above all, Refusal to Eat revolves around a core of moral, practical, and political questions that hunger strikers raise, investigating what it takes to resist and oppose state power.

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The hunger strike’s battle against inequality drives a wedge into the crisis of states and their uneven enactment of democracy across the century

  • Alice Paul

    On October 20, 1917, Alice Paul and other suffrage activists were arrested. After her sentencing, Paul was transferred to Occoquan Workhouse where she began a hunger strike on November 6, 1917. Over the course of her imprisonment, Paul was subjected to forcible feeding three times a day for three weeks. Paul was eventually released on November 27, 1917.

  • Mary McSwiney

    Mary McSwiney, sister of the Irish Republican Terence MacSwiney who died during a hunger strike in Brixton Prison, began a hunger strike on November 4, 1922 after her arrest by Irish Free State soldiers for her opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. While Terence received widespread public support as a symbol of Irish unity, Mary was criticized as a divisive partisan figure. Differences in age, gender, and social status shaped how the hunger strikers of the MacSwiney siblings were publicly perceived as both struggled to fight for Irish independence.

  • Jatindra Nath Das

    Jatindra Nath Das began a hunger strike in April 1929 after his arrest for his involvement with the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. After two weeks of hunger striking, prison officials attempted to force-feed Das, but Das fiercely resisted, causing the feeding tube to puncture a lunch. Das’s condition progressively worsened, resulting in his death on the sixty-third day of his hunger strike. Das was celebrated across India as a political martyr. Gandhi, however, was privately critical of Das’s hunger strike, condemning the act as immoral.

  • Tule Lake Hunger Strikes

    On December 31, 1943, over 200 incarcerated men and boys at the Tule Lake Segregation Camp commenced an indefinite hunger strike in protest of their prolonged detention at the camp’s stockade without facing charges or trial. The hunger strike concluded after six days, after camp administrators refused to negotiate with the hunger strikers. In subsequent days, a majority of stockade prisoners were released. On July 18, 1944, however, the remaining 16 prisoners at the stockade began a second hunger strike, demanding fair treatment. As a result of looming legal charges, camp administrators eventually released all stockade prisoners on August 24, 1944,

  • Robben Island Hunger Strike

    In July 1966, incarcerated ANC and PAC leaders, including Nelson Mandela, began a hunger strike at the Robben Island maximum security prison. The hunger strike at Robben Island arose in opposition to prison authorities’ attempts to foment racial divisions among prisoners, who instead banned together in hunger strike. After days of hunger striking, prison authorities agreed to negotiate with the prisoners, resulting in improved treatment and prison conditions. While these advances did not last, the political power of the Robben Island hunger strike continued to reverberate, inspiring many prisoners to engage in political organizing.

  • Guantanamo Hunger Strike

    On February 27, 2002, prisoners at Guantanamo began a hunger strike in protest of abusive treatment and religious discrimination. Several years later, prisoners began another hunger strike, again demanding better treatment. As the number of hunger strikers grew, prison officials began to force-feed some of the protestors. Questions about the ethics of force-feeding at Guantanamo emerged again in April 2013 after news leaked that 44 of 104 hunger striking prisoners were being force-fed. Recurring debates about force-feeding at Guantanamo drew national outrage and led many to question the ethics of US military prison protocol.

  • Woomera Lip Sewing

    After being held in overcrowded immigration detention facilities for several years, nearly 370 Afghani, Iranian, and Iraqi detainees at the Woomera detention center in Australia began a mass hunger strike in January 2002. Over 50 prisoners participated by sewing their lips closed during the protest. After 16 days, the hunger strike ended when the Australian government began processing Afghani refugee applications. Images of the lip sewing protest, however, continued to circulate through the media, bringing intense public scrutiny to the practices at Australian immigration detention facilities.

  • Karnes County Residential Center

    In March 2015, seventy-eight young mothers went on hunger strike at the Karnes County Residential Center, an immigration detention facility southeast of San Antonio. The hunger striking women fought against the conditions of their incarceration and unjust asylum procedures. Government officials responded by threatening the hunger strikers with separation from their children, prompting media, lawyers, and advocates to investigate the conditions of the Karnes facility. More than a year after the hunger strike, a County District Court judge ruled that the Karnes facility was unsafe, leading ICE to release more than five hundred women and children from Karnes and Dilley detention centers.

Reviews

"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

“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

Related Media and Publications

“Levan Institute for the Humanities Book Chats—Nayan Shah, Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes,” Levan Institute, November 2, 2022.

“Prison Protest” BBC Radio Thinking Allowed, April 2022.

“Inmates’ hunger strikes take powerful stands against injustice” The Conversation, February 2022.

“The Enduring Power of Hunger Strikes” UC Press Blog (Dec 2021).

“Putting One’s Body on the Line” GLQ: Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies vol 25, no 1 (Winter 2019), p. 183-187.

“Feeding Hunger Striking Prisoners: Biopolitics and Impossible Citizenship” Biocitizenship: Lively Subjects, Embodied Action, and Posthuman Politics ed by Kelley Happe and Jenell Johnson (New York University Press, 2018), pp. 155-177.

“Feeling for the Protest Faster: How the Self-Starving Body Influences Social Movements and Global Medical Ethics” Frank Beiss, Daniel Gross, eds., Science and Emotions: Transnational Emotional Cultures in the US and Germany after 1945 (University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 239-262.