What do "Hindoo" do?
This racialized term was commonly used by white Americans and officials to describe South Asian migrants regardless of their actual religion.
What is "Hindoo"?
This motivation was used as reasoning for the perils of stranger intimacy.
What is "preserving white male honor"?
This 1923 Supreme Court case ruled that Asian Indians were not legally “white” for purposes of naturalized citizenship.
What is United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind?
Hotels, bunkhouses, farms, railroads, and other transient spaces matter to Shah's argument because they created opportunities for this phenomenon.
What is Stranger Intimacy?
This article of clothing was used by Sikh men to distinguish their caste and preserve their "male honor".
What is a turban?
This reason is given for allowing South Asians to become naturalized citizens.
What is "high-caste educated status"?
These laws prevented immigrants from gaining citizenship and owning property in the U.S.
What are Alien Land Laws?
South Asian men married this group of individuals to circumvent laws against property ownership and keep their farmland.
Who are Mexican American women?
This crime was used overwhelmingly to accuse and characterize South Asian migrants as "deviants".
What is sodomy?
This group of liminal individuals were utilized by agents of states to capture and accuse South Asian men of sodomy and vagrancy?
Who are newspaper boys?
This spy is repeated mentioned by Shah as being an informant to nation-states on South Asian men's deviant behavior.
Who is Hopkinson?
Sympathetic journalists like William Baer argued that South Asian men were characterized deviants because of this simple reason.
What is loneliness/absense of family ties?
This characteristic of Hindu men was used in comparison to Christian/Caucasian morals, in attempt to elevate their status.
What is monogamy?
By tying a woman’s nationality to her husband’s racial eligibility, U.S. citizenship law gave white women this consequence for marrying South Asian men.
What is the loss of their U.S. citizenship?
This ship of hundreds of Punjabi immigrants was forced to return to India for inciting riots (both among white worker and the South Asian community) despite following Canadian laws that ships had to make continuous journeys from India to Canada.
What is SS Komagata Maru?
Shah’s reading of legal archives cautions us against automatically interpreting intense relationships between men through this modern identity category.
What is homosexual/gay identity?
Shah shows that white fascination and fear with “Hindoos” was ultimately less about discovering South Asian migrants’ actual behavior and more about policing these three interconnected boundaries of national identity.
What are race, sexuality, and citizenship?
By restricting citizenship, interracial marriage, and family formation for Asian Americans, the state effectively treated this as a defining characteristic of national culture.
What is whiteness?
After Thind, some South Asian men who had already naturalized faced this extraordinary legal consequence, showing that racial classification could retroactively destabilize their belonging.
What is denaturalization / revocation of citizenship?
It is because of this core conception that Shah argues South Asian immigrant intimate lives become overly policed, but also able to forge new, novel forms of connections and belonging.
What is transience/pluralism?