The settlement narrative does capture the governance vision of the dominant society, and taming transient settlers became a major focus of all levels and branches of government:įrom police campaigns to incarcerate vagrants to implementing racial restrictions on immigration, voting, and property ownership, governing bodies isolated transients from civic association and democratic promises of equality. Shah looks in particular at the experiences of South Asian migrants. Shah challenges the traditional story of nuclear families relocating from one settled region to a new one, essentially “transplanting the settled society of two centuries of European colonization of the Americas from its eastern seaboard to its western expanses.” 1 The reality, which is readily obvious with some thought about the Alaskan gold rush, timber harvesting, railroads, construction, and farming, involved far more transient, short-term laborers than grand settlement narrative typically incorporates - and these transient settlers often brought their own forms of gender norms, sexuality, domestic relations. Nayan Shah’s 2011 book on race, sexuality, and the law in the North American West, Stranger Intimacy, deals with the complexities of a growing, migratory, contradictory population of the western United States and Canada during the first half of the twentieth century. Articles News Notes About Contact Search Surveillance and Sodomy in 1918 SacramentoĪ “cleanup” of 1918 Sacramento resulted in an intensified “olice surveillance of boardinghouses, brothels, pubs, and gambling houses” and effectively turned these areas – none of which were traditional domestic homes – into “semipublic” spaces.Įvaluate with care and in light of later events.

Nayan shah stranger intimacy