ABSTRACT
Taking its cue from Alexander Weheliye’s question ‘What does hunger outside the world of Man feel like?’ this essay examines the politics of hunger as exemplified in Omar Khadr’s refusal to eat in Guantánamo Bay prison during a series of interrogations in 2003 by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Drawing on Luc Côté and Patricio Henríquez’s documentary You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo (2010), which uses the camera footage of these interrogations, the author locates Weheliye’s question in the context of Guantánamo to explore the political implications of what she calls carceral gastronomy, one that concerns how the imperial state and its functionaries mete out livability through the control and management of appetite. In this encounter between the state and the prisoner, viands serve a manifold function: mediating the relationship of power to those subjected to it; facilitating the emergence of bodies manageable through food; bringing out the colonial genealogies of the ‘War on Terror’; providing the means with which to resist the carceral regime; foregrounding the colonial life of food and feeding; and, finally, racialising the distribution of food.
