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"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
List of contents
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Public Health, Race, and Citizenship
1. Public Health and the Mapping of Chinatown
2. Regulating Bodies and Space
3. Perversity, Contamination, and the Dangers of Queer Domesticity
4. White Women, Hygiene and the Struggle for Respectable Domesticity
5. Plague and Managing the Commercial City
6. White Labor and the American Standard of Living
7. Making Medical Borders at Angel Island
8. Healthy Spaces, Healthy Conduct
9. Reforming Chinatown
Conclusion: Norms as a Way of Life
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Nayan Shah is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at the University of Southern California and the author of Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (UC Press).
Summary
Examining the cultural politics of public health and Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, this text looks at the history of racial formation in the US by focusing on the development of public health bureaucracies.
Additional text
"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."
