Book Review: Refusal To Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes by Nayan Shah

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10575677231190148
• Author: Justin D. Strong
• Date: 01 December 2023
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Nayan Shah. (2022).

Refusal To Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes. University of California Press. Oakland, California. Pp. 384.

ISBN: 9780520302693. $29.95.

Reviewed by: Justin D. Strong, San José State University

DOI: 10.1177/10575677231190148

Nayan Shah’sRefusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes offers a comparative analysis of

prisoner hunger strikes as they have been mobilized within various historical, geographical, and

political contexts. From instances of the particular, such as the women’s suffrage movement, the

South African anti-Apartheid struggle, and the indef‌inite detention of prisoners at Guantanamo

Bay, Shah shows how the prison hunger strike articulates a universalist claim for rights,

dignity, and justice in the face of exclusionary state power. As Shah argues throughout the

book, the hunger strike dislodges dominant cultural presumptions about the body and engenders

new meanings and affects for political and social change. Just as the individual hunger striker

embodies a collective struggle that extends beyond the conf‌ines of the prison, the global perspec-

tive advanced by Refusal to Eat asks that readers contend with the terms and demands by which

we might forge a world in common. As we may glean from Shah’s more incisive observations,

how do we go about translating our personal strife into social agony and for what political

ends? If the hunger strike offers a means to distill the sociality of our suffering in general, how

might this also require our refusal of political categories and understandings of justice otherwise

taken for granted?

Refusal to Eat is not a def‌initive history of prison hunger strikes, but, rather, uses historical cases

of hunger striking to analyze the nature of its protest. Here, Shah’s methodological approach shows

how the archive is always a reconstituted project; that the very determination of the archive –what it

contains and remembers –is itself contingent and open-ended. What we might call an international

archive of the self-starved allows Shah to trace and analyze moments of crisis in democracy as those

excluded from formal rights and self-determination use their bodies to refuse the given social order.

To this point, however, Refusal to Eat misses the opportunity to discuss in more detail the method-

ological choices made in ascertaining the hunger strike as a global phenomenon, as well as the epis-

temology performed through such acts of self-starvation. To the extent that the hunger strike

necessitates forms of remembrance and transmits ways of knowing “…from gut to gut, from body

to body,”as Shah argues (pg. 12), how does this already anticipate the ways in which we study,

account for, and theorize the hunger strike within the geographical and historical registers of interest?

That is to say, there is an oblique argument within the book that the prison hunger strike embodies its

own archival practice by resisting acts of forgetting (on the part of the state and its use of carceral

power) as well as calling upon new forms of public memorialization and testimonial through its

gesture. The ways in which the epistemological capacities of the hunger strike circumscribe the

very methods we have available to study it could have been explored more thoughtfully throughout

the book.

Book Reviews

International Criminal Justice Review

2023, Vol. 33(4) 433-436

© 2023 Georgia State University

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