Nayan Shah is a historian whose books uncover how people struggle with incarceration, migration, and illness in the United States and across the globe. Shah is Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California. His latest book Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes (2022) is the first global history of hunger strikes as a tactic in prisons, conflicts, and protest movements. He also wrote two award-winning books on the experiences of Asian Americans: 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 (2012). Shah has received fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, van Humboldt Foundation, Thomas J. Watson Foundation and Freeman Foundation. He is featured in PBS documentaries on “Asian Americans” (2020) and “Plague at the Golden Gate” (2022). He has worked with the National Park Service, Angel Island Foundation, California Historical Society, and the New York Historical Society to interpret Asian American past and present.
Women fighting for the vote and free speech, Japanese Americans protesting detention with charge, conscientious objectors challenging racial segregation and refugees from Haiti, Guatemala and India protesting their indefinite detention have all wielded the hunger strike across the 20th and 21st century. This presentation grapples with what it means to go the edge of human endurance for one’s cause and conscience. What compels the use of this last resort personal power? How is the hidden protest communicated across prison barricades? Why does the physicians' response compound the crisis aggravating the crisis of government accountability and spotlight the hazards to prisoner care and dignity? Taking seriously the decision-making of hunger strikes, the presentation revolves around a core of moral, practical, and political questions that hunger strikers raise and investigating what it takes to resist and oppose state power.
