Introduction: From Black Famine to the Wildcat Hunger Strike

This introduction examines the cultural reception of Gandhian and Irish Republican hunger strikes circa World War 1. In 1922 W. Norman Brown in this journal dichotomized hunger striking into practices diversely legitimated by a precolonial moral economy (Gandhian) and military instrumentalism (Irish Republican). This binary analytically pivots between the processual dimension of striking as expressive ritual versus stressing the political justification of self-harm as a weapon of war. As in all such binary diagrams these dichotomies were descriptively inadequate. Irish Republican public culture rescripted the hunger striker as allegorically incarnating the nineteenth-century famine in colonial Ireland as British genocide. Moving beyond the dichotomies of moral economy versus instrumentalist action, Miguel Abensour proposes that the wildcat labor strike (grève sauvage) exemplifies Claude Lefort's “savage democracy.” The death fast, considered as a wildcat strike, mobilizes tactics and emblems of self-disincorporation to dramatize and accelerate the disincorporation of concentrationist power such as mass incarceration, migrant detention centers, gulags and lagers, militarized borders and apartheid checkpoints. The self-inflicted wildcat strike savages the body of the hunger striker molding it into a conduit for the savaging of programs of disciplinary normation. In the wildcat strike the hunger striker is both above themselves as agent and below themselves as patient at the same time, thereby closing the circle of subjugation and self-determination.