Stranger Intimacy, 31: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West

and#147;Based on virtuoso research interlaced with a lucid and compelling analysis, Stranger Intimacy challenges the assumptions at the heart of most social history. Refusing to separate political economy, state practices, racialization, and the regulation of domesticity and sexuality, Nayan Shah reads legal and bureaucratic archives for stories of non-normative sociality among multi-racial transient migrants in the early twentieth century. With this treasure trove, he launches a stunning array of arguments against the stabilizing tropes of states and historians, and for an expansive vision of democratic life teeming under the radar of regulation and exclusion. This is a breathtaking book.and#8221;

and#151;Lisa Duggan, author of The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy

and#147;With admirable historical rigor, Stranger Intimacy brings new vitality and intense insight to studies of race, nation, and sexuality. A leader in the field, Nayan Shah brilliantly unsettles official attempts to pin down migrants, to fix them in place in nuclear family households, within and#145;properand#8217; heterosexual constraints. Charting the contested terrains of western North America a century ago, with their complex border crossings, couplings, and collectives, this book radically enhances understandings of estrangement and belonging today.and#8221;

and#151;John Howard, author of Concentration Camps on the Home Front: Japanese Americans in the House of Jim Crow

and#147;Nayan Shah's Stranger Intimacy is a precise account of the lives and labors of South Asian migrants inside a North America that was hostile to them. Drawing from an array of archival materials, Shah charts the social navigation of the migrants and shows us how they build their own worlds. The State and Business saw them as Alien and Worker; Shah restores the migrants to the intimacy of human beings.and#8221;

and#151;Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World

and#147;Stranger Intimacies is a tremendously important book. Shah challenges pervasive patterns in scholarship that assume that the experiences of South Asians or of gays and lesbians are particular and parochial concerns of people with those embodied identities. Instead he draws on the situated knowledge and historically and socially shaped standpoints of these groups to reveal how citizenship, sexuality, and labor are always linked, how heterosexism, racism, and class rule are not aberrant departures from liberal citizenship but rather its component parts.and#8221;

and#151;George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

and#147;Stranger Intimacy is the definitive work that reveals, with persuasion and deep archival research, that Asian American studies requires the study of gender and sexuality. Tracking the movements of Indians to North America in the early twentieth century, it shows us how a diverse set of laws produced immigrant subjects through race, heteronormativity, and the white, nuclear family. and#145;Stranger intimacy,and#8217; in Shahand#8217;s brilliant concept, is the site of regulation, struggle, and possibility.and#8221;

and#151;Inderpal Grewal, author of Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms

and#8220;Show how the history of even a small (in numerical terms) minority has important implications for the ways in which all Americans understand the parameters of citizenship.and#8221;

“Brilliant. . . . [Shahs] lucid prose, vivid stories, and gripping analysis make it a great read for both academic and general audiences.” Julia Camacho (University of Texas, El Paso)

and#8220;An important contribution to the forging of a more complete and inclusive history of the North American West.and#8221;

"Carefully documented and compellingly narrated. . . . Transforms the central questions in Asian American and immigration history." Andrea Geiger, Simon Fraser University - Jrnl Of American History

and#8220;Brilliant. . . . [Shahand#8217;s] lucid prose, vivid stories, and gripping analysis make it a great read for both academic and general audiences.and#8221;

"Carefully documentedand#160;and compellingly narrated. . . . Transformsand#160;the central questions in Asian American and immigrationand#160;history."

In exploring an array of intimacies between global migrants Nayan Shah illuminates a stunning, transient world of heterogeneous social relationsand#151;dignified, collaborative, and illicit. At the same time he demonstrates how the United States and Canada, in collusion with each other, actively sought to exclude and dispossess nonwhite races. Stranger Intimacy reveals the intersections between capitalism, the state's treatment of immigrants, sexual citizenship, and racism in the first half of the twentieth century.

In exploring an array of intimacies between global migrants Nayan Shah illuminates a stunning, transient world of heterogeneous social relations--dignified, collaborative, and illicit. At the same time he demonstrates how the United States and Canada, in collusion with each other, actively sought to exclude and dispossess nonwhite races. Stranger Intimacy reveals the intersections between capitalism, the state's treatment of immigrants, sexual citizenship, and racism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Nayan Shah is Professor and Chair of the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and the author of Contagious Divides (UC Press).

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I. Migration, Capitalism, and Stranger Intimacy

1. Passion, Violence, and Asserting Honor

2. Policing Strangers and Borderlands

3. Rural Dependency and Intimate Tensions

PART II. Intimacy, Law, and Legitimacy

4. Legal Borderlands of Age and Gender

5. Intimate Ties and State Legitimacy

PART III. Membership and Nation-States

6. Regulating Intimacy and Immigration

7. Strangers to Citizenship

Conclusion: Estrangement and Belonging

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index