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

by Nayan Shah

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Grad School, LGBT, Queer, Academic, School

358 pages, Paperback

First published November 28, 2011

Reviews

[Bridget · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shah's second book continues his concern with the role of non-normative households in immigration history, this time focusing on South Asians and including western Canada as well as the western United States. While offering fascinating cases and certainly filling in many gaps in the historiography, I couldn't help but wonder how much his sources (an almost complete reliance on court cases) shaped (what I could perceive was) his argument. In many ways it felt like a west coast version of Gay New York (George Chauncey, 1994), another excellent book, but not what I was expecting out of Shah's second major book.

[Sohum · Rating 4 out of 5]

doesn't treat with sufficient suspicion the motives of white men in bringing on cases--there is a way to treat them as discursive acts undergirded by motivation, and that would have been powerful in this analysis. good body of theory though.

[Ife · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stranger Intimacies is one of those incredibly niche academic books whose implications are far-ranging. Part of the delight of reading it was seeing the expression on my friends’ faces when they asked me what it was about, to which I replied, “interracial sex between migrant workers in the early 20th century Americas”, which one friend met with “you just be reading anything”. But ‘stranger intimacy’ is more than what a gay man might call his cruising habit to make it sound more dignified, and for Shah recounting these sexual histories is a project whose scope is beyond excavating salacious tales – in this book he examines the way the sex and sexuality of mainly South Asian migrants as well as the juridical processes through which these were constructed in the American imaginary illuminate imbrications of citizenship, labour, family, propriety etc. If only Shah knew that the poet William Carlos Williams already beat him to the punch with his poem ‘To Elsie’ concerned about “promiscuity between / devil-may-care men who have taken / to railroading / out of sheer lust of adventure” and marriages with “a dash of Indian blood”. Obviously I’m being flippant, but that poem similarly highlights the American fear of miscegenation between these itinerant workers and so-imagined racial-inferiors at the time. Williams and Shah reach the same conclusion – that the "impure" products of America (and Shah would add sex acts) express the truth about us.

Shah does his analysis mainly through a series of legal vignettes curiously involving mainly men whose last name is Singh. Of all vignettes I found particularly interesting the juxtaposition between the San Francisco case of Samuel Robbins and the sixteen year old Sidney vs. that of Dong Pok Yip and nine year old Albert Hondeville. Both cases involved an older man being accused of sexual contact with a younger white boy in the process of teaching that younger boy a skill, but in the first case in which Robbins was white his proximity to the boy in the first place was seen to be pedagogically appropriate and the allegations were dismissed, whereas in the latter the contact was seen to be suspect. This reminds me of Jane Ward’s assertion in Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men that the man-of-colour is a queering presence in homosocial spaces where straight white men proffer straight explanations for their sexual contact with each other.

I was also very fascinated by the discussion of marriage as something that was figured within liberal discourses as a transnational pact that should be recognized, privileging certain forms of connection and intimacy over others. Chapter 6 and 7 show, however that even the marriages of South Asian immigrants were sites of contestation when they buffeted against the state’s desire to limit the number of foreign undesirables entering America.

I might say that ‘intimacy’ is perhaps described too broadly in this book. It seems to encompass lots of discussions of cases of sexual assault and rape, but also consensual sex, marriage, friendship, labour relationships. There’s a lot going on… The analysis always seems focused, but one gets the sense that it could have been many books. Sometimes broad conclusions also seem to be spun from one case which we are supposed to take as illustrative of the zeitgeist which I treat with a bit of scepticism as juridical rulings have always been uneven, but I understand the project's aim. Many of those critiques I don’t think are Shah’s fault, per se, but can be chocked up to the books straddling of history and theory – a particularity of that academic curiosity ‘American studies’ which you dare not mistake for American history as a discipline.

All in all this a rousing archive of encounters which would no doubt otherwise sink in the tide of history. Shah displays an openness to the not-so-privacies of sex and the way sex has always been, in a sense, a public resource that states seek to regulate, subtended by the logics of race, immigration, religion etc.. As Shah puts it:

For those identified as outside the norms and normativity, the freedom to pursue “intimate conduct” remains unfathomable in a liberal ethos that protects intimacy as the “right of privacy” for those whose public status the state respects and recognizes.

I expected it to be extremely affective in its analysis but was in no way disappointed by the approach I received. The bibliography of this book has also turned me on to other books about migration and sexual cultures, however Shah’s book feels particularly definitive on at least South Asian sexual cultures in the period. Williams will be glad that we finally have someone to drive the car.

[celia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an incredibly powerful examination of race, sexuality, and the law in the North American West. Shah does a careful job collecting archival and legal materials to question certain assumptions stabilizing or underpinning particularly the fields of history and law. This was particularly an interesting read to consider the legal fictions constructed and used during the turn of the 20th century regarding sex and sexuality (both normative and deviant), and how certain narratives relating sex, gender, and immigration, have continued to be deployed (particularly) against South Asian and Latin American (im)migrants in the intervening century.
My one complaint, on a methodological level, is that Shah often leaves many of the end notes to do heavy lifting without further explaining why the source he is citing actually supports his assertion, or how he is extrapolating points - perhaps this is a disciplinary difference, but I was particularly frustrated not to have case citations after many of the legal cases, nor page numbers or explanatory notes after many of the baseline explanations of theory.

[Fei · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid research and documentation of various legal cases of South Asian laborers and their families in early 20th century, navigating queer interactions, inability to marry or bring over families back in the homeland, and other barriers in the west.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sort of the reason that I don’t like histories: a lot of archives, but the theory (which is scant) is better than the archival writing

[Mandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know very little about the history of the Pacific Northwest, so this was really good to read in order to fill in some of my gaps in American history. Shah is a historian, so I found it a bit dry and too listy (examples just seemed to pile up one after another, rather than really exploring the implications of one and extrapolating from there). The idea of an intimacy only attainable by strangers is fascinating, though, and really speaks to some experiences I've had with large crowds.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not sure how this book merits anything less than a 6. Truly difficult and archival historical work going on and then ANALYSIS that is totally idiosyncratic and compelling.

Critics will always harp on style in an academic study; it's dense/ it's not necessarily appealing narratively and I get that, but that's missing the forest from the trees my friends. Be amazed.

[Kristine · Rating 3 out of 5]

👳🏾‍♂️👨‍❤️‍💋‍👨🌎🌏🛂⚖️🌾 yes i will read anything about migration and intimacy