Migration, Intimacy and the Problem of Estrangement: Early 20th century South Asians in North America

IIAS Lecture by Prof. Nayan Shah (Chair, American Studies & Ethnicity, University of Southern California)

The presentation explores South Asian transnational migrants’ practices of social navigation, community building, and participation in multi-ethnic social worlds that undermines the containment efforts of the British Empire, Canada and the U.S. Through a methodology that examines legal cases of sexual and racial transgression, the project illuminates diverse meanings, forms and spaces of migrant association and intimacy and state, policing and legal practices that prevented alternative social socialites from thriving.

The speaker
Nayan Shah is Professor and Chair of the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.  He received his B.A. degree at Swarthmore College in 1988 and the PhD at the University of Chicago in 1995.

Professor Shah is a historian with expertise in U.S. and Canadian history, gender and sexuality studies, legal and medical history, and Asian Migration Studies. His research investigates how transnational migration has shaped state institutions and regulation of health, law and immigration. His new research examines social movements, the tactic of hunger strikes and changes in medical ethics and international human rights, drawing on case studies in South Africa, India, and the United States.  He is the author of Contagious Divides:  Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (University of California Press, 2001), which won the Association of Asian American Studies History Book Prize, and Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and Law in the North American West (University of California Press, 2011), which was awarded the Norris and Carol Hundley Prize by the American Historical Association Pacific Branch for the most distinguished book on any historical subject. He has received fellowship and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, UC Humanities Research Institute, New York University’s Center of Advanced Studies, the Mellon Foundation,  and the Humboldt Foundation. In 2006 he was the Freeman Foundation Distinguished Visiting Professor at Wesleyan University as part of their initiative to bridge Asian Studies and Asian American Studies. Since 2011 Shah is editor of GLQ:  The Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.