Nadide Ozge Serin

NADIDE OZGE SERIN, Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in September 2023 to aid research and writing on “Writing of Death: Ethics and Politics of the Death Fast Resistance in Turkey (2000-2007).” The book is an ethnography of the Death Fast Resistance — a 2,286-day hunger strike-cum-death fast among political prisoners contesting the regime of isolation in Turkey’s new F-type, maximum-security prisons. In contrast to conceptual frameworks that emphasize the power of death, the book contends that the disruptive power of the hunger striking body emerges from a suspended state where the body, neither fully alive nor dead, holds in reserve both the capacity to die and to live simultaneously. This suspended state proves unlivable for an individual subject destined to dissipate into a vegetative state, and yet it can still be engaged by the body as a multitude. The book describes this body as an assembly of multitudinous relations, encompassing connections with martyrs, kin, and the broader community of struggle. It illustrates how it folds together a disjointed plurality of temporalities, endowing the hunger strike with the force of a demand that not only precedes but also transcends mere resistance to the Turkish state.