Nayan Shah

Last updated
Nayan Shah
Education
Occupations

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

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chinatown</span> Ethnic enclave of expatriate Chinese persons

Chinatown is the catch-all name for an ethnic enclave of Chinese people located outside Greater China, most often in an urban setting. Areas known as "Chinatown" exist throughout the world, including Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tong (organization)</span> Chinese immigrant secret societies 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hunger strike</span> Form of protest or political activism

A hunger strike is a method of non-violent resistance where participants fast as an act of political protest, usually with the objective of achieving a specific goal, such as a policy change. Hunger strikers that do not take fluids are named dry hunger strikers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chinatown, San Francisco</span> Neighborhood in California, United States

The Chinatown centered on Grant Avenue and Stockton Street in San Francisco, California, is the oldest Chinatown in North America and one of the largest Chinese enclaves outside Asia. It is also the oldest and largest of the four notable Chinese enclaves within San Francisco. Since its establishment in the early 1850s, it has been important and influential in the history and culture of ethnic Chinese immigrants in North America. Chinatown is an enclave that has retained its own customs, languages, places of worship, social clubs, and identity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chinatown, Los Angeles</span> 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 7,800 residents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of Chinese Americans</span>

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 in the California Gold Rush of the 1850s and the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860s. They also worked as laborers in Western mines. They suffered racial discrimination at every level of White society. Many Americans were stirred to anger by the "Yellow Peril" rhetoric. Despite provisions for equal treatment of Chinese immigrants in the 1868 Burlingame Treaty between the U.S. and China, political and labor organizations rallied against "cheap Chinese labor".

Judith "Judy" Yung was a librarian, community activist, historian and 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 2018.

Frederic Evans Wakeman Jr. was an 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".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Union label</span> Mark indicating labor union affiliation

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 an American historian and writer. He contributed to 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".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lisa Lowe</span> U.S. professor

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in the programs in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to Yale, she taught at the University of California, San Diego, and Tufts University. She began as a scholar of French and comparative literature, and since then her work has focused on the cultural politics of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known especially for scholarship on French, British, and United States colonialisms, Asian migration and Asian American studies, race and liberalism, and comparative empires.

Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a filmmaker and film scholar. She is well known for her work on race, sexuality and representations. She is currently Dean of the Arts Division at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">1900–1904 San Francisco plague</span> Early 20th-century epidemic in the US

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 Republican 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 Gage's credibility, and he lost the governorship in the 1902 elections. The new governor, George Pardee, implemented public-health measures and the epidemic was stopped in 1904. There were 121 cases identified, resulting in 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 there were 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 provost of 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.

Barbara L. 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Sawtelle</span>

Mary Priscilla Avery Sawtelle was an American medical doctor who worked primarily in Oregon. She was also a proponent of women's rights and the editor of the Medico-Literary Journal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sakharam Ganesh Pandit</span> 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; the Court ruled against Thind and 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.

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. 15 June 2020. Retrieved 25 August 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.