Disembodiment examines self-destruction, self-injury, and radical self-endangerment as unconventional performances of refusal that are erased, marginalized, and distorted by metanarratives of history as progress and agency as freedom. From the death-acts of enslaved Africans, hunger strikes of woman suffragists, and Gandhian fasting practices to the self-incineration of Bouazizi, hunger and thirst strikes in the Maze and Guantánamo, and lip-sewing practices of migrants and asylum seekers at the borders of the Global North today, Bargu traces a bleak repertoire of contention performed by the oppressed. As a work in global critical theory whose normative compass is the suffering body, Disembodiment brings together corporeal enactments of defiance from the Global South with major thinkers of Western modernity and prominent critical-theoretical traditions of the twentieth century. Disembodiment offers a materialist theory of corporeal agency that unfolds a stark critique of the present and upholds the body’s powers as fundamentally rebellious and ultimately undomesticable.

 Disembodiment was the co-recipient of the 2025 David Easton Award, given by the American Political Science Association Foundations of Political Theory Section.

Disembodiment was also recognized with the 2026 Sai Felicia Hensel Best Book Award, Honorable Mention by the Interdisciplinary Studies Section (IDSS) of the International Studies Association.

Starve and Immolate tells the story of leftist political prisoners in Turkey who waged a deadly struggle against the introduction of high security prisons by forging their lives into weapons. Weaving together contemporary and critical political theory with political ethnography, Banu Bargu analyzes the death fast struggle as an exemplary though not exceptional instance of self-destructive practices that are a consequence of, retort to, and refusal of the increasingly biopolitical forms of sovereign power deployed around the globe. Bargu chronicles the experiences, rituals, values, beliefs, ideological self-representations, and contentions of the protestors who fought cellular confinement against the background of the history of Turkish democracy and the treatment of dissent in a country where prisons have become sites of political confrontation. A critical response to Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Starve and Immolate centers on new forms of struggle that arise from the asymmetric antagonism between the state and its contestants in the contemporary prison. Bargu ultimately positions the weaponization of life as a bleak, violent, and ambivalent form of insurgent politics that seeks to wrench the power of life and death away from the modern state on corporeal grounds and in increasingly theologized forms. Drawing attention to the existential commitment, sacrificial morality, and militant martyrdom that transforms these struggles into a complex amalgam of resistance, Bargu explores the global ramifications of human weapons' practices of resistance, their possibilities and limitations.

Starve and Immolate was the recipient of the 2015 First Book Award, given by American Political Science Association Foundations of Political Theory Section.

Starve and Immolate was also recognized as a 2015 Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL)/American Library Association.

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