Stranger Intimacy

Nayan Shah will be speaking about his book Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (UC Press).

In exploring an array of intimacies between global migrants, 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 Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego and the author of Contagious Divides (UC Press). He was born in Washington D.C. and grew up in suburban Maryland. Since the early 1990s, he has passionately explored the multi-racial diversity of the North American west and uncovered the unusual cosmopolitan connections and conflicts that have dramatically transformed urban and rural communities from 1870 to 1940. He teaches U.S. history, Asian American history, and history of sexuality at the University of California San Diego.