Nayan Shah - Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes

Writing this book tested me in every wayas a researcher, as a writer, as a person. It made me confront my sense of ethics and my doubts. Hunger strikes are fundamental fights to control ones own body and spirit. Strikes issue visceral demands to change unbearable conditions. Hunger strikes of the past reverberate in the present. In the here and now, fresh strikes erupt. For those directly involved they are undeniable. At a remove, the strikers may be muffled or ignored, but their bodily defiance reveals elemental insights about the human condition and the chasm between what any society is and what it ought to be. Strikes are contentious and volatile politically, culturally, and socially.

As I kept on inquiring what it takes to hunger strike and why strikers persist, I worried about what justice I could do to human lives embroiled in this life-and-death struggle.

I did none of this alone.

A decade ago, a conversation with my colleague Frank Biess made me reflect on my experiences in South Africa in 1989 when hunger-striking detainees were released into public hospitals. I thank Frank for encouraging me to research and share my thoughts on public emotions and hunger striking for a conference he organized on the History of Emotions at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). An opportunity to return to South Africa led to deeper research and an unexpected invitation to speak at the Steve Biko Center for Bioethics, University of Witwatersrand Medical School. There I met Dr. Yosuf (Joe) Veriava, who treated hunger strikers at the university hospital and researched the ethical treatment and recovery of hunger strikers. I am grateful that he shared private research and papers with me that were held at the Adler Museum.

The physicians, hospital workers, and researchers at the Biko Centeras well as the scholars, health practitioners, activists, and ordinary people who attended the first public talks I gavemade me rethink my assumptions, spurring further inquiry about the long history of hunger strikes in prison and detention. I am grateful to those audiences at my early addresses to the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine in Victoria British Columbia, the Saul O. Sidore Lectures at the University of New Hampshire, and the Wisconsin Institutes of Discovery in Madison.

My research deepened and broadened across the globe as I took on an ever more ambitious scale of case studies. I am so grateful for the assistance and guidance of archivists and librarians in the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Ireland, France, India, and Australia for opening up new arenas of investigation. I am especially grateful to Nancy Oda for sharing a draft version of her fathers diary of the hunger strike at Tule Lake camp. Reading its pages and hearing his story from his daughters perspective deeply impacted my understanding of a prisoners motivations. Back at home, I benefited from the assistance of librarians and interlibrary loan specialists at the University of Southern California (USC) and UCSD. The research was supported by a UCSD Academic Senate Grant and by USC Dornsife College, and I particularly appreciate the timely support of my department chair, John Carlos Rowe, and vice-deans, Sherry Velasco and Peter Mancall, and Dean Amber Miller.