Overview
- Incorporates testimonials from ex-political prisoners
- Uses a feminist lens in its sociological and anthropological examination of hunger strikes
- Dismantles the false binary of non-violent vs. violent resistance
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Table of contents (14 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
2022 Winner of the Palestine Book Awards
Rooted in feminist ethnography and decolonial feminist theory, this book explores the subjectivity of Palestinian hunger strikers in Israeli prisons, as shaped by resistance. Ashjan Ajour examines how these prisoners use their bodies in anti-colonial resistance; what determines this mode of radical struggle; the meanings they ascribe to their actions; and how they constitute their subjectivity while undergoing extreme bodily pain and starvation. These hunger strikes, which embody decolonisation and liberation politics, frame the post-Oslo period in the wake of the decline of the national struggle against settler-colonialism and the fragmentation of the Palestinian movement. Providing narrative and analytical insights into embodied resistance and tracing the formation of revolutionary subjectivity, the book sheds light on the participants’ views of the hunger strike, as they move beyond customary understandings of the political into the realm of the ‘spiritualisation’ of struggle. Drawing on Foucault’s conception of the technologies of the self, Fanon’s writings on anti-colonial violence, and Badiou’s militant philosophy, Ajour problematises these concepts from the vantage point of the Palestinian hunger strike.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Ashjan Ajour is an Academic Researcher in Sociology at the University of Leicester, UK and the incoming Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Centre for Middle East at Brown University, USA. Her research focuses on gender, feminist theories and movements, decolonization, political subjectivity, and incarceration.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes
Book Subtitle: Revolutionary Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body
Authors: Ashjan Ajour
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88199-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-88198-6Published: 15 December 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-88201-3Published: 16 December 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-88199-3Published: 14 December 2021
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 342
Number of Illustrations: 6 illustrations in colour
Topics: Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Social Philosophy, Terrorism and Political Violence, Politics and Gender, Sociology of the Body