Transcript - "Bodily Defiance and Immigrant Detention"
February 23, 2023 -- CRG Angel Island Forum Series
Listen to "Bodily Defiance and Immigrant Detention" with Nayan Shah.
LETI VOLPP: Good afternoon and welcome to our event, "Bodily Defiance and Immigration Detention with Professor Nayan Shah.
Before we begin let me say that there's live captioning available if you locate the button on the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. I will begin with the land acknowledgment.
We take a moment to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of xučyun (Huichin (Hoo-Choon), the ancestral and unseated land of the Chochenyo (Cho-chen-yo) speaking Ohlone people the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County.
This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma (Muh-wek-muh) Ohlone Tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona band. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley Community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land since the institution's founding in Consistent with our values of community and diversity we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the University's relationship to native peoples by offering this land acknowledgment we affirm indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.
My name is Leti Volpp, and I'm the director of the Center for Race and Gender here at UC Berkeley. We're thrilled that you can be with us today for this event which is the third of three public lectures forming the Center for Race and Genders Angel Island Forum Series. This series was designed to accompany the campus-wide project a year on Angel Island organized by the Arts and Design Initiative and the Future Histories Lab. Today's event was preceded by lectures by professors Erica Lee and Elliot Young. Many thanks to the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative for co-sponsoring these events.
I want to now introduce our featured speaker for today I am thrilled that we get to hear today from Professor Nayan Shah. Shah is Professor of American Studies and and Ethnicity, and of History at the University of Southern California. He is the author of three incredible books, "Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown", published in 2001, "Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West", published in 2012, and "Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes", just published in 2022. Professor Shah is renowned for how his scholarship has advanced and changed our understanding of comparative race and ethnic studies, LGBTQ studies, the history of migration, public health law, and incarceration. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants including from the Rockefeller Foundation the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Melon Foundation , the Von Humboldt Foundation, and the Freeman Foundation.
Professor Shah will begin with the lecture and then there will be an opportunity for discussion with Q&A. Please post your comment or question into the Q&A button on the bottom of the screen. So without further ado, let me turn it over to Professor Nayan Shah. Thank you.
Nayan and you're muted.
NAYAN SHAH: Hello. I'll start again thank you so much Leti, for that wonderful introduction and for the Center of Race and Gender and for all the co-sponsors at Berkeley for this event. It's really exciting to be part of a conversation with other scholars that I you know have been engaging with for decades Erica Lee and Elliot Young among others, and also to be part of this larger dialogue around the history of Angel Island. And really trying to think about Angel Island in a variety of different ways.
So what I'm going to do with you today is really talk about Angel Island as a quarantine station and the role of medical inspection in immigrant detention. I'm going to share my screen and let's see how this operates.
So my talk today is an opportunity. I think you're seeing more of my screen.
But okay let's see there we go, so my presentation today really tries to look at this experience of immigrant detention on Angel Island. And the experiences of different ways of trying to think about bodily defiance. I'm gonna draw from as as Professor Volpp suggested my book "Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown". Which is a longer history of how to think about race and public health in the making and remaking of Chinatown, and the experiences of Chinese immigrants from medical menace to model citizen from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th.
A critical part of this history is the history of Angel Island. And I want to sort of begin by suggesting that we might want to speak to and think about the space of Angel Island as one in which we're reckoning with these different kinds of histories of the intensification of quarantine, and the expansion that occurred in the 19th and into the 20th century. In which new technologies were harnessed new knowledge and networks of medical detection were employed in order to think about a larger question around commerce and migration, around the globe but also to really specifically hone in on this experiences of Chinese and other Asian immigrants.
So quarantine regulations were developed to institute national surveillance and gatekeeping nets at the nation's ports and land crossings. They were part of processes that were happening across the globe. Quarantine had up through the 19th century been highly localized administered by by particular ports and nation-states and federal governments, like the United States, didn't actually involve themselves directly in every aspect of port quarantine. They left it up to customs officers and the like.
But what we end up happening in the 1890s is this transformation of the U.S federal government to expand quarantine an immigrant extent inspection. And to be involved in a systematic way of screening and detaining passengers from ports on ships, as well as other land borders. And the ostensible concern is to think about epidemic diseases, the diseases of smallpox, and cholera, and Bubonic plague, that impacted um the histories of of the 19th century in really profound and important ways. I want to sort of, I'm using this map here that that's so drawn from Encyclopedia Britannica, to draw a question to how Bubonic plague was being mapped across the globe in a variety of different ways. And to appreciate that this process of mapping where Bubonic plague was starting in Yunnan, the the third the third plague epidemic entering into Hong Kong in 1894, and traveling across to many different ports across the globe.
This was actually a product of imperial health intelligence. This is a product of the U.S Public Health Service having officers across the globe, in many ports that were critical to its to Commerce in different places not just in Asia, but also in Africa and South America, and Europe. They worked also in conjunction with British officials, French officials, in order to give a kind of systematic picture of how disease and epidemics were moving. This process you know was all intensified around the idea of preventing different forms of disease infiltration.
And in 1892 the Secretary of Treasury when testifying to Congress said every serious epidemic that this country has ever known has been traced to the Immigrant. And the idea that immigrants were a source of disease was a profoundly important one to mobilize the kind of resources that were necessary to develop immigration stations. But first to develop these quarantine stations.
So the quarantine station in San Francisco Bay and Angel Island has actually begun in 1891. With a wharf, several Barracks, officer quarters. About 18 months later a disinfecting station was created, and a hospital as well. So these were all the elements of building up the quarantine station where Public Health Service officers would go, and quarant, and fumigate and quarantine boats and goods, and inspect people on board ships. And this was happening to every ship that would come into San Francisco Bay.
But a special feature of this work was actually the importance of creating a an opportunity to apply medical screening for immigrants and travelers from Asia, from South America, from Australia. And this was galvanized by concerns that emerge out of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Law. which as many people appreciate as an exclusion law for Chinese laborers, but what it does is sets up regulated immigration for Chinese Merchants, students and their families. And this is a really important aspect of this process by which Angel Island becomes a very important immigration, detention center and immigration investigation center.
This work that's being done is first to subject Chinese arrivals to a more prolonged detention to investigate their immigration claims which leads to opportunities for further medical investigation. As early as 1892, the Public Health Service officers were checking the health status of every Chinese arrival to San Francisco. They might let other people pass through, Europeans are coming through, people from South America, but they were going to specifically check everyone who was Chinese. And they were doing it to document the names and origins of all the Chinese who were held for medical observation and treatment.
But once they began to do that process immigration authorities, who were from a separate branch of the government, coordinate with them and created the time, the space, and the opportunity for both investigations about their immigration status, whether they could pass scrutiny as being merchants, or students, or the family members of of such, or um you know to sort of see if they were really requiring further medical scrutiny and investigation.
So the scrutiny and investigation first on Chinese then got implied applied to uh so-called Hindus, people from South Asia, Punjabi, Bengali, Afghani men and women. Scrutiny on Japanese migrants, particularly so-called "Picture Brides" women who married with Japanese men and those marriages occurred where the husband was absent. The spouse was absent, was in the United States and they would travel with immigration papers. That they had the marriage, had actually been conducted officially in Japan.
It was also an opportunity for greater scrutiny on what after 1906 and 07, after the great earthquake and fire in San Francisco which destroyed all all records, including birth records Chinese who claimed to have been born in the United States and born specifically in San Francisco could invite the immigration of their children, the paper sons and paper daughters, and to try to decipher whether they truly were who they say, they were as far as their identity.And all those different kinds of Investigations which were immigration investigations also became medical investigations , or opportunities for that. Because what's happening in this process is a kind of public health service medical gatekeeping. And an attention to a range of different kinds of diseases.
So I'm sure as Erica Lee shared with you before. We know that there are 350,000 immigrants are believed to be held at Angel Island from 1910 to 1940. Judy Young and Erica Lee have documented that. They've estimated 120, 000 were Chinese, 60,000 were Japanese, there were 12, 000 Russians 7, 000 South Asians 1000 Koreans, the rest are split among 75 other nationalities. But what they were, what we often understand is the quarantine station was in place already and they were also doing different kinds of gatekeeping around different kinds of diseases health. Screening practices were changing and shifting in the 20th century. There was that concern with acute infectious disease at all times of course, smallpox, mumps scabies, a variety of different diseases. But in 1903, the development of a book of instructions for medical inspection of immigrants create different classes of immigrants. And it created different classes of. I'm sorry medical conditions that were thought to be of concern.
First, were the ones that were contagious or so-called loathsome diseases, this was pulmonary particulosis, trachoma syphilis, gonorrhea, leprosy. And some of those diseases like leprosy and tuberculosis, syphilis and gonorrhea, could actually be result in immediate exclusion. Automatic grounds for exclusion and deportation. Class B conditions where diseases and defects which would interfere with the immigrant's ability to earn a living, including a range of conditions including heart disease, and hernia, and poor physique, and chronic rheumatism, defective vision. This was amended in 1907 and1917. Trachoma was the disease that eye disease that was particularly of concern in the early part of the 20th century.
In fact in the first decade of the 20th century trachoma was a signature disease of medical exclusion. As a proportion of medical deportations rose rapidly in 1900, more, most of those trachoma certifications were at Ellis Island in New York. But within five years those diagnostic techniques and interpretations that were made were applied to other immigration stations from Galveston to San Francisco. In 1900, only 1 in 1600 immigrants that were arrivals had trachoma but by 1908 it was nearly 1 in 300 that were detected to have it. And these eye exams were not only administered at first in 1900, only to people that had visible symptoms such as granules or inflammation around the eyes, but medical deportations rose sharply when it was systematized as an excludable disease in 1903. And trachoma was one of those diseases that could result in immediate exclusion. So it was considered to be a contagious disease. It was it was one that could in extreme cases lead to blindness. All immigrants in Ellis Island were subjected to those like eye exams, and they used special kinds of buttonhooks and techniques of the fingers to avert eyelids to sort of discover that. Of the 2,900 medical deportations say in 1908, 90 percent were certified to be trachoma. Now this technique however transformed, or techniques for medical deportation transformed in 1910.
And this happened in San Francisco. And this happened at Angel Island. There was a greater concern about what you could discover about diseases that were parasitical diseases that could be, could lead to this future disability. And it's part of a general interest and concern about how one monitors disability. So the range of the kinds of diseases that were were found were diseases that as I said were about the detection of parasites. Now to detect parasites in the body one needs to actually do different kinds of investigation. One needs to do blood tests or fecal exams. So you can imagine that this takes more time, and also takes laboratory inspection to happen.
And so the critical invest investigations that occurred around Asiatics people from Asia or the Asian races, was this parasite detection and research at in at Angel Island. It was the only place that had the kind of, the chem, the kind of bacteriological lab microscopic instruments to do systematic work. It couldn't happen at Seattle, or San Pedro, or San Diego. It really was an innovation that happened there. And where it happened is that even there was a lot of disputes about trachoma, there was a kind of intense interest in finding other kinds of diseases that might lead to future disability.
And so in 1910, the public health officer in Glover, Dr. Glover wanted to do a kind of test study to help see and test the establishment of what its full-scale bacteriological lab could do. And so after inspections on board of incoming steamer this inspector detained six South Asian men at Angel Island Hospital with the initial diagnosis of anemia. And after conducting tests of their feces Glover discovered that they had hookworm. And what was visible under the microscope were the eggs of the hookworm parasite. He extrapolated that the eggs indicate the parasite was within the individual stomach and intestine. He then ordered feces exams of all South Asian men who are already in the hospital and found that the hookworm ovum was present in over 70 percent of the South Asian patients. And then he extended this to all Asian patients. What he was doing was sort of taking a kind of concern and suspicion about a diagnosis he was uncertain about what the cause was anemia. And he was using bacteriological investigation first on that group of people, and then extending it out with a kind of racial logic to see about who he, were believed to be, liable to be infected by parasites even when they demonstrate no visible signs of suffering or incapacitation.
So these apparently healthy carriers harbored a variety of dangerous portable pathogens in their bodies. So first it was hookworm, and then whipworm, roundworm. A whole range of these which left the host unaffected but that Dr Glover feared would have devastating effects on unsuspecting White Americans. And so the, the effect of this is to cut down the rate of so-called Hindu immigration very rapidly by applying this test and then applying this idea of of immediate exclusion.
But what Glover's also helping us understand is that he's tying ideas about sanitary behavior and hygiene. Ideas about cleanliness onto a particular kind of group. So-called "Orientals" who he argues have filthy habits that make these kind of conditions endemic. And that no amount of care or cleanliness in the station will remove the dangers to the health of others because of of the behavior and the practices of these these particular individuals. He's trying to make this argument and he doesn't quite impressively around trying to say that these bacteriological capabilities of investigation provide for an opportunity to deal with an immigration problem that the federal government hasn't yet completely come to terms with.
And to also instantiate kinds of ideas about research that can be done in this in the State of California, and particularly in the Bay Area. In fact he's really excited about the fact that there's a great deal of opportunity to study intestinal parasites, as a field of tropical medicine, as you can appreciate this is a time when the U.S has colonized the Philippines, Hawaii is also a territory, there are other ambitions of other kinds of locations. The tropical medicine is a really important element of the process here. And trying to sort of marry the idea that parasites can be studied and removed from um so-called "Orientals", Asian aspiring immigrants and then they could be preserved for instructive processes in the future. Now the Public Health Service officers, legislators are all fearing the parasite diseases would produce future disability and dependency that could strain community charity and state coffers. Are likely to be public charge clause that could deny people arrial into the United States.
The contest however is whether this, these diseases are found, are communicable and whether they're also um going to lead to short-term or long-term disability. You know in fact Chinese-American community and Chinese displacements challenges to Public Health testing practices. They bring on experts from local, among local medicine professors and physicians, who testified that some of these parasites are not directly communicable in American conditions. People are likely to live in this community with such, with such a a worm, or without being a mess with their health.
And in fact the public health service has access to treatment that can be given to people that would improve their conditions and make them literally free of the disease. So it's a really important and robust process by which the aspects of medical study and investigation lead to different forms of immigrant interrogation and immigrant exclusion that make a lot a lot of murkier cases where people are making claims to being able to enter the United States. They use the scientific diagnosis as a way of trying to create a kind of steadfast exclusion.
This medical gatekeeping is really based on a racial and class selection for investigation it deploys different kinds of bacteriological knowledge and techniques around predicting future fitness. And as you'll probably appreciate the larger intent of this is around making better Americans, a larger, a largely Eugenics project, And it's sort of connected to these ideas that hookworm and other parasites are the germs of laziness. That they affect people who are laborers, peasants people who may, like American Southerners both black and white.
In fact the Rockefeller Foundation at this time is supporting a whole range of different ways of producing clinics and therapies and administering them in the U.S. South to reduce the incidence of hookworm. And hookworm is, and among others, is being used as a way of trying to use medical expertise to reveal the truth of the Immigrant body and what that immigrant future could be. So the idea of the status of a human carrier who's able to transport pathogens but unaffected by the presence of foreign organisms was deeply alarming of course to officers. But they the fear was really collapsing the designation of a parasite organism with the status of being perceived as a social parasite. And the fact of the matter is that many of these parasitical diseases would actually be ones where over time they, they quickly realized that they could actually administer treatment. They could charge the immigrants for the treatment and then release them once they were free of the disease.
But what I want us to turn to now is what's been missing so far in this presentation which is really the voices of the Chinese detainees themselves. And in order to sort of speak to that very specifically around medical diagnosis, and medical investigation, and medical detention. I want to talk a bit about something I'm sure you might have awareness of which is this really important aspect of the, the poetry that's inscribed on the barrack walls at Angel Island.
And I want to first begin by saying that this was as a discovery that was made by Asian American Community activists and historians to halt the destruction of the Angel Island barracks in the 1970s, to demand preservation of its poetry, and the widespread dissemination of it. Was really a dramatic act of retrieval that that connected people that were working in the park service with community historians that were translating and compiling the poetry that was carved on the walls of the Chinese detention barracks, and it also involved conducting extensive oral history interviews with detainees who successfully entered the United States through Angel Island.
In order to give a fuller sense of what their experiences were and also to challenge the putatively benign history of the immigration and quarantine station. I wanted to sort of you know also understand that this prospect of of even just removing, and reading the different kinds of inscriptions, really did reveal something else that was going on in the barracks. There was a pitch battle going on between detainees and authorities over the walls from the very beginning. The carvings were filled with putty, brushstrokes were painted over, there were at least seven layers of paint, and peeling walls with poetry on each one of them. And because they used putty, and because they used this way of there's a incredible way in which we actually can preserve that poetry.
And so there are fragments of at least 220 poems and also hundreds of other inscriptions that actually were on these barrack walls. And they provide a different way in which we can understand a little bit of what's going on in this contest. But I want to talk about turn now to like what the poetry itself was actually revealing. So when confronted with the experience of these investigations. The humiliation of examinations that occurred where people were stripped of their clothing, where they were coerced to have samples of their blood or their excrement, they were put in detention some of the poetry really does reveal some of what that experience is. I want to sort of point to this one here. "I thoroughly hate the barbarians because they do not respect justice. They continually promulgate harsh laws to show off their prowess. They oppress the overseas Chinese and also violate treaties. They examined for hookworms and practice hundreds of despotic Acts". This you know sort of gave you a sense of this idea, of the outrage that's going on, the sense that there's a kind of almost a battle going on between the so-called barbarians, White Americans, who are promulgating these harsh laws that you know defy what Chinese see as treaties that have happened between the Chinese emperor and the U.S. government. And they really are engaged in a form of despotism from their vantage point.
And there's a longer poem that sort of says more about this which I find really quite striking. You know there's about people's aspirations, this one poet's aspiration. Now these are Chinese literate men who are writing this poetry, carving it. They may have some degree of education. They're definitely drawing on different kinds of strategies and tropes of poetry that have been structured on. And one thing we should appreciate is that people are listening to this poetry being recited. So that there might be you know there might be several literate people that are reading this poetry out loud to the other detainees. Not knowing who the author is, not knowing anything more, but the story that they're telling. And here, you know this poet is really trying to give insight into the problem of their detention by this kind of experience around the stabbing of the ear to test the blood, and examining excrement. And this idea that there's a shadow of hookworm, and the dangers that emerge for them in their isolation in the hospital, not knowing what the outcome of this is going to be, the kind of humiliation and oppression that they feel. But also a kind of message to the future, to fellow villagers, to other people that would come to have these wild words.
This kind of experience resonate. And you can sense that this person who's writing this, you know was both in prison in the hospital and then maybe released back to the barracks, and wrote this poem about their experience. And these poems are really highlighting ideas about the capriciousness of U.S. use of political power and authority. They don't necessarily perceive themselves as being ill. They're told they have an illness. They're required to go through a process of cure. They are perceived as a medical problem and the public health services quest to medicalize their body becomes really part and parcel of their feeling of oppression, and grief, and depression, and sorrow.
Now I want us to understand that when they were, when the California Park Service and when Asian American and other community people were sort of trying to find out more about these carvings, they also discovered that were carvings, that were not just, the majority of them were for Chinese individuals, and in the barracks, the male immigrant quarters. But you can sort of see this kind of design map, that they're also ones that are in other kinds of locations, there's one and, there's ones that are in women immigrant quarters as well. There are Japanese inscriptions from World War II, when Japanese were held. Japanese P.O.W.s were held. Here there were Russian inscriptions as well for the Russians that were also held here. During World War II, German inscriptions as well. And there's also graffiti from the 1960s.
So everyone had a part in this. And there's a kind of dialogue it seems between the different kinds of inspections. In a sense that even if they're operating in different languages that there's a different symbolics that people are in engaged in different ways and kind of a form of narrating what their experience is. And so the idea here of characterizing the assault the humiliation, the despotism and the verses, and in oral history testimonies, is really recognizing that they don't view the public health practices as helping themselves. As being an element of care but rather as a way of excluding them, or authoritarily subjecting them to different kinds of experiences of detention. They are discrediting U.S. claims of transparency in their democracy or egalitarianism, or justice. Even though public health officials are rationalizing, and politicians are rationalizing this isn't necessary for national health security. The poetry, in particular, unequivocally refuses the prerogatives.
And I'll say this is also really important to keep in mind because there were efforts that were Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association Chinese, you know sort of community groups that were mobilizing with hiring American White attorneys and trying to get experts to, also fight, medical experts to fight these cases. They kind of had to buy into the idea that it was necessary to identify certain diseases as medically excludable. What they were looking for is saying are these diseases that that are ascribed truly contagious? Are they truly debilitating? Are they justifiable rationales for actually detaining people or deporting them for medical causes?
So there's a way in which people are trying to work within the system to actually try to lobby the public health service officials, the immigration authorities to change the ways in which they interpret policy. But they still hold that justification in there that the authorities have the right to designate a disease and say that's the right for exclusion or for specific kinds of unilateral treatment. And I think that's a really important thing for us to keep in mind considering the subsequent history of this.
So you know when you move beyond, Angel Island closes in 1940, but the kind of experience of this idea of how people's bodies are medicalized and how they're treated. And the ways in which they're made vulnerable is something that I think we can see not just in what happens in the detention and mobilization that happens in Angel Island, but in other places.
Like the experiences that occur on the southern border. In 1917 on the El Paso Border there was a medical typhus scare. And housekeepers, and contract workers who daily cross the border had to be screened, had to bathe, strip nude for an inspection, undergo lice treatment and had their clothes treated in a steam dryer. You know one of the people in 1917, you know several of the women who experienced this like Carmelita Torres, a 17 year old maid from Juarez, resisted this humility procedure. Talked back and onlookers also began to protest sparking what again known as the "Bath Riots" they revolted because of the ways in which they were experiencing this disinfectant. They don't know what what's going to actually be. What it what it actually is. They're also worried about the health personnel secretly photographing women in the nude and posting this snapshots in a local Cantina.
Subsequently, during the Bracero Era from 1942 to 1964, the U.S. and Mexico created an agreement to allow Mexican male laborers to enter the United States on temporary work permits. They went through medical inspections that occurred you know among the 4.5 million braceros during this period of time who worked in agriculture in the railroad sector. They were brought to contracting centers in central Northern Mexico where they had to wait for several months before entering the United States. There they were subjected to personal inspections during which they were stripped naked. They also experienced in on the U.S. side of the border where they're they're strip naked as well and sprayed with DTT (Dithiothreitol). So this idea that the fear of disease, the disease is coming from is coming from a foreign place, and on the bodies of immigrants sort of justifies a whole range of different kinds of very intensive interventions that are made as the cost and price of entering the United States.
So we can see why these the fear of disease you know kind of reverberates. I mean this is actually, the sorry about this the diseases of the Border. This particular clip is actually from December of 2019 in which there was great concern about that was being promulgated on Fox News and among politicians about diseases of the Border, tuberculosis, scabies and lice, dengue fever, measles, and chickenpox, leprosy, a whole kind of host of things. And a kind of concern about what's happening in medical detention, what's happening in immigrant detention in these these sites.
But I want us to appreciate that the sphere of disease you know obviously is very much at the center of Title 42. Which was established, I mean it had earlier earlier history, but it was established the way we understand it in July 1944. It is a law that grants Federal authorities the power to deny entry of people and products into the country to limit the spread of a communicable disease. And the CDC and under the Trump Administration invoked Title 42 shortly after the covid outbreak in 2020. In order to prohibit border crossing agencies from holding migrants in "congregant settings" like holding stations or detention centers where Covid-19 was spread rapidly. In effect Title 42 gave the government power to rapidly expel any migrant, without giving them an opportunity to make a case for staying in the country legally, including seeking asylum. The border patrol has expelled migrants more than 2.5 or more million times according to the Customs and Border Protection Authority's statistics from last year. Half of the 4.8 million migrant encounters of the Southwest Border have resulted in expulsion over this period. Title 42 allows for quick returns without repercussion has encouraged some migrants to try again and again to cross the border.
We just want to keep in mind that this earlier history was, also this history of this process which is ongoing in the courts today, and the Biden Administration extended 4, and apply, continue to apply it but it's also being fought in the courts in a variety of different ways and there's changes that are happening week by week it seems about this. But the fundamental idea here is that detention, and immigrant detention is tied to medical inspection is tied to concerns about the spread of communicable diseases. Not necessarily about the concerns of the prisoners themselves. As we know people that are imprisoned in conditions that are very overcrowded and with a lot of challenges around the kind of medical care that's actually being deployed. There are many people who are concerned about the health and welfare of these immigrants of detention, but the state is also empowered in ways to engage with using it as an opportunity to stop immigrant arrival. And also to lead to forms of expulsion, so there's a kind of continuity in this process of immigrant detention.
And I just want to close with appreciating that that part of this also this history is about all the different ways in the 2000 teens that we see a great deal of immigrant detention on the Southern Border and played out in many different locations in which there have been different forms of protests that have occurred. Among Central Americans, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Cuban, Haitian and lately Chinese immigrants, who have all been trying to seek asylum and have been in detention or engaged in situations in which their families are separated. And that there's a larger contest around these large-scale detentions in which people don't know what their process is. It's also, in which their process of administratively going through the process of parole for their claims is being denied or extended. And we really see in this different ways in which there are other forms of body defiance and protests, so this is really coming out of the end of my latest book, "Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes" where I end the book really looking at the kind of bodily defiance and solidarity campaigns that are occurring around hunger strikes that have been occurring in these detention centers. And kind of continuously erupting in different ways from Florida to California to the Pacific Northwest and Texas, in Louisiana and Georgia, and any place where these detention centers occur. Where there have been documented cases of more than 2,000 hunger strikes occurring, two thousand people in hunger strike occurring over the span of of eight years. Up before the experience of Covid-19 and the expulsions.
So I want to end here with just this kind of a recognition of this kind of power of trying to think about what the experience of immigrant detention is, the experience of medical intervention and the different strategies of bodily defiance that are used and employed by immigrants that are detained. People who are seeking asylum or seeking entry, about what their condition is, and about who cares for them, and the different kinds of solidarity campaigns that emerge both inside and outside of these detention sites.
So with that I'm going to stop sharing my screen and and take questions.
LETI VOLPP: Wonderful. Thank you so much Nayan.
I will remind our listeners who are in the webinar that you can post questions in the via the Q&A button and we will raise them to Professor Nayan Shah.
That was so fascinating I would love to hear more if you might be willing to talk a little bit more about your most recent book "Refusal to Eat". I'm fascinated by the way in which both of these book projects deal with questions of bodies and health as a kind of through line for your work, as well as thinking about questions of detention and prison and confinement, and as well as you're saying um the question of defiance or protest.
And thinking about poetry on the walls as a form of protest. I had never thought before about what you just said which is that people would read these out loud to each other and that this was a way of of communication kind of intergenerationally in terms of different groups of people who are in detention. I think that's really fascinating. Thinking about how people communicate in carceral spaces and mobilize in that way.
Curious about the idea of bodily defiance and what it does or could mean? There are sections of this book, that in case people haven't had a chance to read, looking at the question of hunger strikes in so many different contexts from suffragists to Bobby Sands dying in Ireland to South Africa to Australia, and thinking about people literally sewing their lips shut as a form of protests who are in Immigration detention in Australia, in addition to refusing to eat. And your incredible analysis of how we think about lips, and like sewing lips shut, and what does that mean. In addition to refusing nutrients. I will say this was not easy to read in the sense of the kind of work it required of you to do which I imagined was just excruciating in terms of, how do you understand what it does to the body just to starve? And ways in which governments have chosen to forcibly feed people what are the techniques, etc.
So um so anyway if you could say a little bit about the links you see around bodies, health, confinement as well as defiance and protests, between these projects. How did you, what drew you to these? I think that might be interesting.
NAYAN SHAH: Yeah. I think it's really interesting, I think the project of refusal to eat and really trying to think about the experience of incarceration and what this seemingly, this move that's made about hunger strike where as drawing harm onto the person themselves rather than onto their adversary or to the authorities. But it's sort of a jiu jitsu move it actually, forces the authorities to pay attention to the care and take responsibility for the what's happening when the person is actually saying, "I'm refusing everything I'm going to take this last piece of sovereignty over my body, by my refusal".
And I want to just sort of emphasize that hunger strikes occur after so many different kinds of protests are happening in in cultural regime. So if you want to think that there's lots of different kinds of protests that were occurring in Angel Island, some of which we are we can find, that are and discover some of them are visible to us and some of them are not. But the hunger strike is I learned through this process a kind of way of trying to force the communication and a kind of way of sort of saying "I will do this to my body in order to make you listen to what my concerns are".
And it's not just a communication to the authorities , it definitely unsettles them. because you know the distribution of supply and and coordination around food is central to any kind of carceral regime. Like you know whether you're gonna use food as punishment or you know how you're going to portion it and schedule it. But it's also centrally a way of trying to break the barrier across the prison barricade to outside enlisting other people in. And sometimes those are physicians and nurses, sometimes those are lawyers, sometimes those are people on the outside, family members or people who are total strangers, but hear about what's going on.
So the strategies of communication of what it means to imagine someone else's hunger and their move to starvation is the most extraordinary part about the possibility of hunger striking and what it means. Because whether it was you know Alice Paul or Bobby Sands or Nelson Mandela or people we who we don't really know, you know who are hunger striking in Australian detention or in the U.S. or in South African detention in 1989.
There's an idea there, that they themselves can't actually their voice can't be heard. But by doing this action people pay attention and draw people to this precip of life and death, and in a way ask people to imagine what it means to take this move to go to the edge of human endurance something that many of us could never fathom doing more for than say a day. To do it for days, and weeks, months. And it's also a bargaining it's using time it's not a protest that is about it's about saying I'm going to endure this I'm going to enact this over and over again I'm going to continue this strike. And it might, it might stop and the start, it might be continuous, but it's actually a way in which I think there's a kind of leveraging that's going on of the conditions in which someone before may have felt like they were in a carceral tomb, that they couldn't be heard, they couldn't be listened to.
And so I think that that desperate move is made when thinks seem impossible or intractable and I also do think that it produces, it's it's a. It took me a long time to appreciate that as gut-wrenching, literally, this reading about this is and about what people endure in terms of forcible punishment and and feeding that it's it's a kind of utopian move. It's like saying "I believe that my suffering will catch your attention out there, somewhere. I don't know who you are but you will do something to change my condition". And you know many times it doesn't cross the barrier or crosses only in in certain ways but it's a really extraordinary thing to say that you know I think that's the same kind of move that's being made with the barrack wall poetry. That whatever has happened to me, I may have been deported, I may have entered. I don't. You don't know but I'm going to tell this my story, my pain, and my suffering to communicate to you, so you feel like you are not alone. That other people have gone through this and what you take from that is not not necessarily certain.
Although I think the authors of that poetry and the authors of hunger strikes try to believe that you will approach them with a kind of care and wanting them to continue to live, and wanting to to set aside um their suffering. And eat again most hunger strikers don't go all the way to their death. They threaten it, but they, they survive, they're survivors. And many of them don't want to talk about what they endured. They want to talk about their trauma afterwards because they had other things about their lives they wanted to move forward with, they went through this extreme thing.
So I think I hope gives you a little bit of a glimpse about the book project. And there's so many more questions I could address there but you know.
LETI VOLPP: That's so fascinating. It reminds me, we share a friend, Muneer Ahmed, who's a professor at Yale who had been one of the attorneys representing Omar Khadr, who's the Canadian citizen who was arrested in Afghanistan as a teenager, was taken to Guantanamo. And Muneer Ahmed ended up writing this article and he told me he wanted to title it "Guantanamo Is About the Body" and I was like what do you mean it's about the body. He ended up calling it something else, but a lot of the writing is about saying "I am here. See me."
Right and if people try to do that through the law, through making a rights claim, right but if that doesn't exist, like what are you left with especially in a carceral space. You have your body right so it's like protesting with your body albeit in this way that I think on first glance I think many of us have this reaction like that seems so counterfactual like you're hurting yourself.
But thinking about this as well what other recourse do you have? Thinking about this as a, as a mode of communication, think is so powerful. I had emailed you that you know that their people in immigration detention who just started hunger striking on Friday in Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex which are two facilities that people from Northern California are currently detained in. And they had tried other strategies. Like they would doing a labor strike to say like you're paying us a dollar a day for our labor but this isn't moving anywhere sufficiently, so let's now try a hunger strike.
And anyway so it is something that is so powerful. but also so it's fascinating and also disturbing. I think you know for the reasons you talk about.
Keeping an eye on the time, just this tiny little window we have. I wonder if you could say a little bit about something that I found so fascinating in your book was ways in which prisons basically forced people to, to be fed. And I know it's like not easy to talk about very quickly, but if you could say a little bit about how you think about that. About keeping the body alive for the purposes of confinement, essentially.
NAYAN SHAH: Yeah. I think this is such a powerful element of the contradictions that are engaged right. So, so feeding, feeding someone artificially there are lots of different techniques that have been used from asylums to slave ships to the prisons. And there are innovations that have been made, technical ones, that throughout the 20th century physicians have, and nurses have debated this. About whether, what the, the purposes is, and and really it is the purpose I think some very clear-eyed folks realize that it's the purpose of keeping someone alive in prison is for the purpose of the prison. Not for the prisoner.
The prisoner is not a patient in the same way as they are in the hospital or the medical clinic. They are custodial for the prison itself. And the prison will do many things to punish, hurt, and harm prisoners, but it's really extraordinary around the forceful feeding moment. That you know, as any physician or nurse understands, as anyone who's tried to feed someone who is dependent on them, you cannot feed someone who doesn't want to be fed without hurting them. And you hurt them, and there's a way in which I think in prisons there's a kind of keep someone alive but shatter their spirit and harm their body as a kind of compulsion.
And it's such a it's such a vast and paradoxical thing it's so full of all the different things where forceful feeding seems to be something that even when it's agreed upon, in the courts by a judge, there's always this incredible trepidation around violating someone's bodily autonomy and someone's will. And in fact you know in, in hospital settings, and in settings in people's homes where you're feeding a loved one, you you want to take care. And it takes time to take care.
And I think in the prison setting time is something that is administratively they want to do something quickly or and therefore forcibly, inevitably. Even with whatever intentions are there.
So going back to Guantanamo. Guantanamo is where the biomedical research that was done out of South Africa that was done really by physicians who cared about the prisoners who had been released into hospital and want to create protocols to encourage them to feel comfortable you know with the process of refeeding because refeeding after a long duration of not eating is a difficult process and can lead to a lot of toxic harms if done too fast or done in particular ways. So they are trying to teach how to do that, and create that as part of the medical research. And in the process U.S. authorities and prisons and in Guantanamo, calibrate those same ideas about how to deal with metabolic issues and then use it as a way of continuously producing nutrition and into someone.
And even the hunger strikers, and at different times in Guantanamo you know suck on their tubes, they know they're going to be fed but they are still protesting the ways in which they're being treated. And they even think of their enduring hunger strike and being long-term forcibly fed as part of the continuation of their hunger strike. And they are not wrong as authorities in Israel have discovered, as authorities in Australia have discovered, as Australian authorities in the United States have discovered that, and and this is what stopped the long-term force-feeding in Britain in the 1970s because of the horrific processes that were going on and how that was publicized. Which is why in, you know the the infamous case of Bobby Sands and the others in Maze Prison happened because they refused to be force-fed and the government had now removed itself from the idea that they weren't going to feed by force unless someone went unconscious. And only then with the permission of the family, which is actually what ended that you know horrific saga. But it did produce this history of the hunger strike to the death and it had reverberations for prisons and protest movements up till now. People will still refer to that moment.
So I, I think it's all a kind of strange, painful paradox. I think the most important thing for all of us is to witness what's going on. And to not it's it's it's really easy to turn away and I turned away many times in this book, I turned away many times in the writing of it. But I think there was something really important about the persistence, the voice, the desire to reach out that hunger strikers are expressing and I feel like out of you know respect and humility, I feel like we need to listen and understand why this is not working.
LETI VOLPP: Well on that note. Thank you. Thank you for your powerful, wonderful words and work. This most recent book "Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes" Professor Nayan Shah, thank you so much for being with us.
NAYAN SHAH: Pleasure. Thank you.