This lecture will focus on Nayan Shah’s current research on the international history of mass prison hunger strikes, in particular the largely unknown struggles in Tule Lake Japanese American incarceration center in 1944 and the proliferation of hunger strikes in immigrant detention in California and Texas in 2010s. The lecture previews Shah's larger upcoming book project, Refusal to Eat, which investigates the tenacious practice of hunger strikes as it grew as a potent transnational idiom of 20th and 21st century political defiance. Following his earlier work, Stranger Intimacy, Shah examines these practices through the lenses of intimacy, affect and the material cultures of bodily defiance.

Bio:
Nayan Shah is Professor of History and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His research examines historical struggles over bodies, space, and the exercise of state power from the mid-19th to the 21st century. Shah is the author of two award-winning books -- Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (2011) and Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (2001).

Shah's new project, Refusal to Eat, explores the transnational history of mass hunger strikes, and political struggle and medical ethical crises through 20th century and contemporary case studies drawn from U.S. and British suffrage activists, Irish Republicans, Bengali Revolutionaries, Japanese American Internees, South African anti-apartheid activists, Guantanamo prisoners, and refugees in Australia, the United States, and Europe.

Graduate Student lunch also available in afternoon. Please contact Mika Kennedy <mikake@umich.edu> for details.

Non-departmental sponsors:
The Border Collective Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop
Critical Ethnic & Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies RIW