From Wasting Away to a Way with Waste: The Visibility of Moath al-Alwi’s Hunger and Sculpture

It is a common characteristic of prison protest that incarcerated people must make use of what they have materially available at hand to engage in acts of resistance, whether their own bodies or ordinary objects around them. In this chapter, I compare hunger-striking and prison art as different but related forms of material practice and political resistance associated with incarceration. While hunger striking and prison art are therefore connected in general, these themes emerge even more starkly in the context of wrongful and inhumane imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s ideas about worldliness and transcendence, as well as the art and activism of Moath al-Alwi, I specifically relate wasting away, through hunger striking, as continuous with having a way with waste, or reusing discarded materials as prison art.