Reflective indocility: Tariq Ba Odah's Guantánamo hunger strike as a corporeal speech act of circumlocutionary refusal

Tariq Ba Odah is a detainee who has spent over a third of his life in Guant anamo Bay's detention camp. Despite being cleared for release in 2009, he has been imprisoned in Guantánamo without charge since 2002. In this essay, I situate Ba Odah's ongoing hunger strike in the context of Michel Foucault's theorization of the politics of resistance. I draw on Foucault's delineation of the criticality of avowal in juridico-penal settings and the manner in which resistant acts of avowal, as instantiations of what he terms "just speech," are imbricated with relations of veridiction and the capacity to speak truth to power. In my theorization of Ba Odah's hunger strike as a defiant speech act fundamentally predicated on a modality of body politics, in the latter part of this essay I work to illuminate the complex relations of embodied cognition that inscribe his resistant practice.