The history of sexuality among migrant minority groups has long been overlooked in the academic world, but standing before an audience of about 30 attendees in Tawes Hall Monday night, Nyan Shah tackled this complex topic with breadth and humor.
In a lecture entitled “Stranger Intimacy, Transience, and Unsettling History,” Shah — a history professor from the University of California, San Diego — detailed the racial and social dynamics that affected relationships between global migrants in America during the early 1900s. While university graduate students and faculty comprised most of the audience, the event also drew visiting students and professors from Washington Adventist University.
Shah argued that because history so often relies on documents created after a group of people settle in a certain area, the authors of history textbooks often fail to account for nomadic groups.
“We love to talk about contradiction. We love to talk about change,” Shah said. “But so often we are hampered by our own ability to write about change.”
Shah said because minority migrants were constantly on the move, their culture was characterized by fleeting relations between strangers, or “stranger intimacy.” He also described the dangers faced by queer men from minority migrant groups due to the prevailing racism and prejudice against homosexuals during this period.
Shah brought up a number of cases where these men were racially profiled or even jailed by police, and officers even peeked in through keyholes to spy on these men and catch them in sexual acts. However, he said these threats only served to “energize” these minority migrants to coalesce as a group and bravely continue their relationships in spite of the danger.
In covering a wealth of information, Shah visibly battled against his one-and-a-half hour limit. When some of his papers spilled onto the ground, he simply nudged them over with his feet and walked around them without even a momentary pause in his speech.
At the end of his lecture, Shah fielded questions from the audience, ranging from serious topics such as the effect of capitalism on stranger intimacy to more light-hearted banter about the colorful queer weddings of the 1980s and 1990s.
Washington Adventist University student Ashley Butler said she appreciated the opportunity to see this often neglected page of history in a new light.
“I thought it was very interesting, especially since [the lectures] refer to a culture that has been greatly overlooked,” she said. “Not only do we need to recognize these themes, we also need to recognize that these themes have always been there and to give them a voice.”
news@umdbk.com
