Nayan Shah

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Nayan Shah
Education
Occupation

Nayan Shah is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at University of Southern California. He received his doctoral degree in history at the University of Chicago and previously worked as a professor of history at University of California, San Diego and Binghamton University.

Research and Teaching

Shah is a historian with expertise in North American and global struggles over public health, migration and incarceration from the mid-nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. His research is most well known for its reconceptualization of how racial meanings are remade by articulations of gender and sexuality in state politics and culture.

Shah's first book, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown, investigates the long history of the perception of Chinatown and Chinese immigrants as sources of contagion. The book examines how the demonization of Chinese immigrants reverberated in policy, politics and cultural life of San Francisco residents and the United States. Shah shows how Chinese Americans responded to health regulations and allegations with persuasive political speeches, lawsuits, boycotts, violent protests, and poems. Adroitly employing discourses of race and health, these activists argued that Chinese Americans were worthy and deserving of sharing in the resources of American society. Contagious Divides won the Association of Asian American Studies History Book Prize in 2002. [1]

In his second book Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West, Shah explores the contestations over the meanings of state power and citizenship through the social relationships that arose among South Asian migrants in the western United States and Canada in the twentieth century. "Stranger Intimacy" received the American Historical Association Pacific Branch Norris and Carol Hundley Award for Most Distinguished Book on any historical subject. [2]

Shah’s third book, Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes, traces the global history of mass hunger strikes throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Using case studies drawn from U.S. and British suffragettes, Irish Republicans, Bengali prisoners, Japanese American Internees, South African anti-apartheid activists, Guantanamo prisoners, and detained asylum seekers, Refusal to Eat explores how prisoners wield the hunger strike to communicate viscerally within and outside the walls of the prison. Erupting out of moments of democratic upheavals, hunger strikes unleash volatile personal and political power to upend prison regimes, governments and assumptions about gender, race and the body’s endurance. Although varying in their ability to yield immediate results, Shah argues that hunger strike protests can propel far-reaching and unexpected effects across the globe and throughout history. [3]

Shah is featured in documentaries on PBS and the History Channel. [4] He has worked with the National Park Service, Angel Island Foundation, California Historical Society, Fowler Museum (UCLA) and the New York Historical Society to document and imaginatively interpret Asian Americans in the past and present. [5] [6]

Related Research Articles

A Chinatown is an ethnic enclave of Chinese people located outside mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore or Taiwan, most often in an urban setting. Areas known as "Chinatown" exist throughout the world, including Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Africa and Australasia.

Tong (organization) Organizations or secret societies of Chinese immigrants in Western cities

A tong is a type of organization found among Chinese immigrants predominantly living in the United States, with smaller numbers in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. In Chinese, the word tong means "hall" or "gathering place". These organizations are described as secret societies or sworn brotherhoods and are often tied to criminal activity. In the 1990s, in most American Chinatowns, clearly marked tong halls could easily be found, many of which have had affiliations with Chinese organized crime.

Hunger strike Method of nonviolent protest in which one fasts for extended periods of time

A hunger strike is a method of non-violent resistance in which participants fast as an act of political protest, or to provoke the feelings of guilt in others, usually with the objective to achieve a specific goal, such as a policy change. Most hunger strikers will take liquids but not solid food.

Chinatown, San Francisco Neighborhood in San Francisco, California, United States

The Chinatown centered on Grant Avenue and Stockton Street in San Francisco, California, is the oldest Chinatown in North America and the largest Chinese enclave outside Asia. It is also the oldest and largest of the four notable Chinese enclaves within San Francisco. Since its establishment in 1848, it has been highly important and influential in the history and culture of ethnic Chinese immigrants in North America. Chinatown is an enclave that continues to retain its own customs, languages, places of worship, social clubs, and identity. There are two hospitals, several parks and squares, numerous churches, a post office, and other infrastructure. Recent immigrants, many of whom are elderly, opt to live in Chinatown because of the availability of affordable housing and their familiarity with the culture. San Francisco's Chinatown is also renowned as a major tourist attraction, drawing more visitors annually than the Golden Gate Bridge.

Chinatown, Los Angeles Neighborhood of Los Angeles

Chinatown is a neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles, California that became a commercial center for Chinese and other Asian businesses in Central Los Angeles in 1938. The area includes restaurants, shops and art galleries but also has a residential neighborhood with a low-income, aging population of about 20,000 residents.

History of Chinese Americans History of ethnic Chinese in the United States

The history of Chinese Americans or the history of ethnic Chinese in the United States includes three major waves of Chinese immigration to the United States, beginning in the 19th century. Chinese immigrants in the 19th century worked as laborers, particularly on transcontinental railroads such as the Central Pacific Railroad. They came not only for the gold rush in California, but were also hired to help build the First Transcontinental Railroad. They also worked as laborers in mining and suffered racial discrimination at every level of society. Industrial employers were eager for this new and cheap labor. This resulted in many white people losing their jobs and were stirred to anger by the "yellow peril." Despite provisions for equal treatment of Chinese immigrants in the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, political and labor organizations rallied against immigrants of what they regarded as a degraded race and "cheap Chinese labor."

Judy Yung was professor emerita in American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specialized in oral history, women's history, and Asian American history. She died on December 14, 2020 in San Francisco, where she had returned in retirement.

Frederic Evans Wakeman, Jr. was a prominent American scholar of East Asian history and Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley. He served as president of the American Historical Association and of the Social Science Research Council. Jonathan D. Spence said of Wakeman that he was an evocative writer who chose, "like the novelist he really wanted to be, stories that split into different currents and swept the reader along," adding that he was "quite simply the best modern Chinese historian of the last 30 years."

Union label

A union label is a label, mark or emblem which advertises that the employees who make a product or provide a service are represented by the labor union or group of unions whose label appears, in order to attract customers who prefer to buy union-made products. The term "union bug" is frequently used to describe a minuscule union label appearing on printed materials, which supposedly resembles a small insect.

Him Mark Lai was a historian of Chinese America, a leader of the Chinese-American community, and writer. He helped restore the state of Chinese American historiography. Lai "rescued, collected, catalogued, preserved and shared" historical sources in Chinese and English. He was known as the "Dean of Chinese American history" by his academic peers, despite the fact that he was professionally trained as a mechanical engineer with no advanced training in the academic field of history. The Chronicle of Higher Education named Lai "the scholar who legitimized the study of Chinese America".

Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a filmmaker and film scholar. She is well known for her work on race, sexuality and representations and is currently a Professor of Cinema.

The San Francisco plague of 1900–1904 was an epidemic of bubonic plague centered on San Francisco's Chinatown. It was the first plague epidemic in the continental United States. The epidemic was recognized by medical authorities in March 1900, but its existence was denied for more than two years by California's Governor Henry Gage. His denial was based on business reasons, to protect the reputations of San Francisco and California and to prevent the loss of revenue due to quarantine. The failure to act quickly may have allowed the disease to establish itself among local animal populations. Federal authorities worked to prove that there was a major health problem, and they isolated the affected area; this undermined the credibility of Gage, and he lost the governorship in the 1902 elections. The new Governor George Pardee implemented a medical solution and the epidemic was stopped in 1904. There were 121 cases identified, including 119 deaths.


Ann Laura Stoler is the Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research in New York City. She has made significant contributions to the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies, historical anthropology, feminist theory, and affect. She is particularly known for her writings on race and sexuality in the works of French philosopher Michel Foucault.

As of 2012, 21.4% of the population in San Francisco was of Chinese descent, and at least 150,000 Chinese American residents. The Chinese are the largest Asian American subgroup in San Francisco. San Francisco has the highest percentage of residents of Chinese descent of any major U.S. city, and the second largest Chinese American population, after New York City. The San Francisco Area is 7.9% Chinese American, with many residents in Oakland and Santa Clara County. San Francisco's Chinese community has ancestry mainly from Guangdong province, China and Hong Kong, although there is a sizable population of ethnic Chinese with ancestry from other parts of mainland China and Taiwan as well.

Amy Sueyoshi is the associate dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. Sueyoshi is a trained historian specializing in sexuality, gender, and race. Her publications and lectures focus on issues regarding race and sexuality such as cross-dressing, pornography, and marriage equality.

Sexuality, including same-sex sexuality, and other non-normative forms of sexuality have been central to the history of Chinatown, San Francisco. San Francisco's Chinatown, founded in 1848, is the first and largest in the United States. San Francisco was shaped by early Chinese immigrants, who came from the Guangdong province of southern China. These immigrants gathered in the Bay Area in order to join in the California Gold Rush and to build railroads in the American west. San Francisco's Chinatown made room for these early Chinese immigrants to live, and the area turned into a "bachelor society", where female prostitution was pervasive because of the Chinese Exclusion Act. As a racialized immigration region, Chinatown was viewed as an immoral place with the characteristics of "vice", "sluttery" and "sexual deviance" for a long time. These traits were incompatible with the mainstream culture and dominant norms of American society. From the mid-19th century, the state problematized Chinese female prostitution with the subject of sexual transmission, and the government began to go against industrial prostitution in Chinatown, as well as Chinese immigration. As the sex industry grew throughout the Bay Area, the government had to stop the anti-prostitution and anti-immigration law in the beginning of the 20th century. Just like the Castro district and other areas, Chinatown developed its own sexual industries and provided a variety of sexual entertainment to both immigrants and white visitors.

Mary Ting Yi Lui is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University and head of Yale's Timothy Dwight College. She is Yale's first tenured professor specializing in Asian American Studies and the first Asian American female to serve as head of a Yale residential college. A former director of undergraduate studies and director of graduate studies for Yale University's American Studies program, she is also affiliated with Yale's Ethnicity, Race, and Migration program and its Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. Lui is the author of The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City, a co-winner of the 2007 Best Book Prize for History from the Association for Asian American Studies.

Barbara Voss is an American historical archaeologist. Her work focuses on cross-cultural encounters, particularly the Spanish colonization of the Americas and Overseas Chinese communities in the 19th century, as well as queer theory in archaeology and gender archaeology. She is an associate professor of anthropology at Stanford University.

Sakharam Ganesh Pandit Indian American civil rights lawyer

Sakharam Ganesh Pandit (1875–1959), also known as S. G. Pandit, was an Indian American lawyer and civil rights activist. Pandit immigrated to the United States in 1906 and became a citizen in 1914. In 1923, he represented Bhagat Singh Thind in the Supreme Court case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, which found that Indians were ineligible for United States citizenship. However, Pandit successfully fought against a subsequent attempt to remove his own citizenship, and the federal government thereafter gave up its efforts to denaturalize Indian Americans. Pandit died in Los Angeles in 1959.

William Speer (1822-1904) was an American pioneer Presbyterian missionary and pastor, to the Chinese in Canton (1847-1850), where he helped establish the first Presbytery in Canton, and to the Chinese in California, where he founded the first Chinese Protestant church outside of China and became a strong advocate for the Chinese in California. Later (1865-1876) he served in Pennsylvania as the Secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Education.

References

  1. ↑ Shah, Nayan (2001). Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN   978-0520226296.
  2. ↑ Shah, Nayan (2011). Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN   978-0520270879.
  3. ↑ Shah, Nayan (2022). Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN   978-0520302693.
  4. ↑ "Asian Americans". PBS. Retrieved 25 August 2021.
  5. ↑ Odo, Frank (2017). Finding a Path Forward: Asian American and Pacific Islander National Historic Landmarks Theme Study. Washington, DC: National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. ISBN   978-0-692-92584-3.
  6. ↑ "Culture Fix: Nayan Shah and Candace Browne on Rina Banerjee". Fowler Museum at UCLA. Retrieved 25 August 2021.
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