Contagious Divides charts the dynamic transformation of representations of Chinese immigrants from medical menace in the nineteenth century to model citizen in the mid-twentieth century. Examining the cultural politics of public health and Chinese immigration in San Francisco, this book looks at the history of racial formation in the U.S. by focusing on the development of public health bureaucracies.
Nayan Shah notes how the production of Chinese difference and white, heterosexual norms in public health policy affected social lives, politics, and cultural expression. Public health authorities depicted Chinese immigrants as filthy and diseased, as the carriers of such incurable afflictions as smallpox, syphilis, and bubonic plague. This resulted in the vociferous enforcement of sanitary regulations on the Chinese community. But the authorities did more than demon-ize the Chinese; they also marshaled civic resources that promoted sewer construction, vaccination programs, and public health management.
Shah shows how Chinese Americans responded to health regulations and allegations with persuasive political speeches, lawsuits, boycotts, violent protests, and poems. Chinese American activists drew upon public health strategies in their advocacy for health services and public housing. 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.
Reviews
"This striking book asks provocative questions and seamlessly weaves together narratives central to the history of race, Asian Americans, urban politics, public health, and citizenship. . . . Using an array of sources and theoretical frameworks, Contagious Divides is an extremely important, original, and engaging book. It offers us a striking new vantage point from which to view racial formation, the role of the state, and public health in marking exclusion and inclusion in the United States." ― Journal of American History
"Deftly threading several potent concepts pertaining to modernity, liberal democracy, and citizenship, Shah's monograph stakes out an original, highly imaginative, and rewarding approach to apprehending both the microcosm of San Francisco's Chinatown and the history of Chinese and Chinese Americans in the United States." ― H-Net
"Through his study of the interconnections between epidemics, public health, and the Chinese community, Nayan Shah provides new insights into the reasons for both this repulsion and fascination. Contagious Divides, which covers nearly a century in the history of the city’s Chinese community, allows the reader to assess the emergence of the Chinese as a medical threat as well as their gradual transformation into model citizens. . . . This informative book illuminates an important chapter in the history of American culture." ― Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
"The author draws on an impressive variety of sources, including English-language newspapers, published rumors, pictures, letters, poems, oral histories, and public health reports. Moreover, Shah adroitly engages with queer and postcolonial theories and with histories of public health in Africa and Asia." ― Isis
"Shah's history of race and epidemics in San Francisco offers us constructive criticism for present and future wars on disease and a cautionary tale of hope for tolerance." ― American Quarterly
"Nayan Shah has written a book of exceptional originality and importance. With a focus on issues of body, family, and home, central concerns of urban health reform, he illuminates the role of political leaders, public opinion, and professionals in the construction and reconstruction of race and the making of citizens in San Francisco. He brilliantly analyzes the politics of the movement from exclusion to inclusion, regulation to entitlement, showing it to be an interactive process. Yet, as he shows with great subtlety, the mark of race remains. As a study of citizenship and difference, this work speaks to a central theme of American history.” — Thomas Bender, Director of the International Center for Advanced Studies at NYU, and editor of Rethinking American History in a Global Age
"Contagious Divides is an ambitious contribution to our understanding of the troubled history of race in America. Nayan Shah offers new insight into the ways that race was inscribed on the streets, the bodies, and the institutions of San Francisco's Chinatown. Above all, he offers powerful examples of the impact of ideas about disease, sexuality, and place on the rhetoric and practice of racial inequality in modern America.” —Thomas J. Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis
Related Media and Publications
“An Old Hate Goes Viral” interview subject Reveal News audio documentary PRX Radio, June 2020.
“Contagion, Culture and Care” UCLA Leve Center for Jewish Studies June 3, 2020 with Sunny Yudkoff (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Nayan Shah (USC), and Caroline Luce (UCLA).
“Pandemic Narratives and the Historian” Los Angeles Review of Books May 18, 2020.
“Empire of Medical Investigation on Angel Island, California” Quarantine: Local and Global Histories edited by Alison Bashford (Palgrave MacMillian, 2016), pp. 103-128.
“Public Health and the Mapping of Chinatown” Asian American Studies Now ed. Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas Chen (Rutgers University Press, 2010), pp. 168-192.
“Between “Oriental Depravity” and “Natural Degenerates”: Spatial Borderlands and the Making of Ordinary Americans” American Quarterly (September 2005), pp. 703-725.
"Perversity, Contamination and the Dangers of Queer Domesticity" in Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi (eds.) Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), pp. 121-141.
“Cleansing Motherhood: Hygiene and the Culture of Domesticity in San Francisco’s ‘Chinatown,’ 1875-1939” in Antoinette Burton, ed. Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (Routledge, 1999), pp. 19-34.
"‘White Label’ et ‘peril jaune’: Race, Genre et Travail a San Francisco au XIXe siecle et au debut du Xxe siecle” Clio: Histoire, Femmes et Societies (France), 1996, number 3, pp. 95-115 (trans. ”The 'White Label' and the 'Yellow Peril': Race, Gender and Labor in San Francisco in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries")