The Paradox of Dis/appearance: Hunger Strike in Athens as a Performance of Survival

Abstract

This chapter analyses a large-scale hunger strike act, performed by 300 migrants, staged in a makeshift ‘camp’ in the Law School building in Athens in January 2011. It began when the 300 men — all asylum seekers and economic migrants — embarked on a hunger strike in order to pressurize the Greek government into paying attention to their demands for legal status. I examine this event as a means of practising resistance and as a spectacle that draws attention to migrants’ disappearing bodies in order to create a political space for recognition. The construction of the hunger strike was dramaturgically compelling: the staging and scene can be analysed in relation to their positions on the threshold between public and private. In this chapter, however, I shift the focus from defining the hunger strike as ‘performance’, which is briefly summarized here, and turn towards considering this performance within the context of crisis and austerity in Greece as a situation of extremity, multiplied by migrants’ precarious legal status. Thus, rather than rely on the mapping of performance and hunger strike, my argument seeks to position the social conditions of the crisis contemporary to the hunger strike as a performance that distinctly stages a politics of dispossession. Hunger as a conscious, unravelling performance of resistance displays wider socio-political dispossession.