The book's last chapter and conclusion bring readers up to the post–World War II era in which some of the consequences of South Asian migrants' ineligibility for citizenship continue to play out. He marks the operation of multiple understandings of masculinity and honor in working-class communities even as the flux provoked the consolidation of heteronormative domesticity. His book pays close attention to the first two decades of the twentieth century, tracing the changes in the categorization of racial identities, sexual practices, marital ties, and their accompanying property arrangements. Shah provides the first carefully documented and compellingly narrated historical account of the erotic lives of early twentieth-century South Asian migrants who circulated through the urban and rural spaces of the Canadian and U.S. In the 1990s, Jennifer Ting's essays and Richard Fung's evocative documentary Dirty Laundry (1996) challenged this kind of straight Asian American history. It has portrayed them as living a life without heterosexual comforts, with a lucky few being able to marry Mexicans and Chicanas to secure their claims to California farmlands after the state passed the 1913 Alien Land Law. What do we know of the intimate encounters of early twentieth-century South Asian migrants to Canada and the United States other than the public anxieties about sexual degeneracy that fueled campaigns in the Pacific Northwest and California to exclude them? Until Nayan Shah's Stranger Intimacy the historiography of South Asian migration during this period focused on the political and economic struggles of these migrants, predominantly men.

Nayan shah stranger intimacy