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Robert Durán, The Gang Paradox: Inequalities and Miracles on the US-Mexico Border

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Date01 October 2020
AuthorPatrick Lopez-Aguado
DOI10.1177/1462474520917066
Published date01 October 2020
Subject MatterBook Reviews
SG-PUNJ190026 389..412 Book Reviews
567
its fundamentally religious – even mystical – dimensions, is less precise than his
treatment of other anti-colonial and anti-state movements.
In the book’s brief fifth chapter, Grant turns from the motivations of starving
prisoners to those of the English, Irish, and Indian officials who were the targets of
their protests. Here, he explores in greater detail how governments across the
British Empire dealt with the logistical hassle and political embarrassment of
hunger striking. Starving prisoners knew that officials were often willing to
make concessions to avoid scandal, especially when demands were for modest
improvements in prison conditions. Despite officials’ fear that fasting prisoners
might damage the legitimacy or international standing of British imperial rule,
even successful hunger strikers generally achieved very little; the right to wear
one’s own clothes or an early release rarely sparked revolution (pp. 149–150).
While Grant highlights interconnections among England, Ireland, and India,
especially between English and Irish suffragettes and Irish and Indian nationalists,
he does not propose a causal relationship or a chain of transmission of political
starvation among movements or colonies. Hunger, he argues, was too polyvalent,
both for the starving and those who interpreted their starvation. It could be an act
of faith, violence, despair, or solidarity; feminine self-sacrifice or masculine cour-
age. People did it to shame and to entertain, and they did it because they were
mentally ill. Last Weapons is an engaging contribution to the histories of punish-
ment, political movements, and anti-colonial activism in the late 19th and early
20th centuries. Grant admirably captures the complexities of self-starvation for its
practitioners. However, the book is quite lean and might have benefited from more
attention to the imperial ideology, professional networks and wider legal and penal
contexts that made hunger striking politically salient. De...

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