The talk considers the keyword "hunger strike" and the historical, social, and political conditions that motivate the rise and transformations of this puzzling and persistent bodily defiance in the 20th and 21st centuries. Investigating contexts from South Africa, India, Ireland, the United States, and Iran, historian Nayan Shah explores the visceral ways that hunger striking communicates through media and political movements, and how it can turn a personal agony into a call for collective action.

Nayan Shah is a historian whose books uncover how people struggle with incarceration, migration, and illness in the United States and across the globe. His latest book, Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes (University of California Press, 2022), is the first global history of hunger strikes as a tactic in prisons, conflicts, and protest movements. He also wrote Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (2001) and Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (2001). Shah is Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. This year he is L.A. Times' Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library and Research Center.