Interviewee: Nayan Shah

Interviewers: Divya Aikat and Christina Huang

Date: July 10, 2023

Location: Pasadena, California

Transcriber: Christina Huang

Length: 1:26:00

Christina Huang (00:16)
Hello everyone, my name is Christina Huang.

Divya Aikat (00:19)
My name is Divya Aikat.

Christina Huang (00:22)
Today's date is July 10 2023. And we are currently in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the US. And today we are here with Dr. Nayan Shah, who's a professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at University of Southern California and has been significant supporter and contributer to SAADA. Could you please introduce yourself and give a little bit of a background?

Nayan Shah (00:46)
Sure. I'm Nayan Shah. I am a professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at USC. I'm speaking to you from Pasadena,California. I received my PhD from the University of Chicago in 1995. I took my first job at the University of New York at Binghamton. From 1995 to 2000, I was an Assistant Professor of History there. And I was the first Asian American Studies hire on the tenure track at SUNY Binghamton. After that, I went to San Diego, UC San Diego for 12 years and then joined USC in 2012. I was born in Washington, DC, and I grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland. My neighborhood was one of those suburban Fair Housing Act neighborhoods. So my parents moved in 1968. And with them moved in all kinds of people who had previously been restricted from buying housing in Montgomery County, Maryland. And that was included people who were Jewish American, Italian, American, Greek American. We were the one Indian American family, there was one Chinese American family and there was a family from Costa Rica. And there was one elderly African American couple that lived on our street. And over time that those things have changed my parents, my mom still is alive and well and living the same house. And her neighborhood has now Somali, Vietnamese, Nigeria, Ghana and everywhere. So it seems like a transformation that's pretty extraordinary. At this point, I think there is a young white couple that lives next door, and they're probably the only white couple that are in the neighborhood. So a big change in Silver Spring. But I'm really excited to be talking with you both about Asian American Studies and about how it's become institutionalized and different in my own experiences with that, as well as anything else you'd like to know about Asian American Studies.

Divya Aikat (03:08)
We're excited to talk with you too. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.

Christina Huang (03:13)
Yes thank you so much. Thank you for sharing that, we noticed that you have an incredible like academic work. You have three books, publications, documentaries on PBS, you're on the History Channel, and even the entire Wikipedia page. One thing that we noticed was that there's not a lot about you and your background and how it ties into the work that you do now. And we wanted to learn a bit about how does that influence what you're doing now and give listeners information into the whole world of why you do the things you do today?

Nayan Shah (03:51)
Sure, I'm happy to share that with you. It's really important for me to say that when I was growing up being a South Asian American, Indian American, at the time where I grew up in my neighborhood, and my school system was kind of a unique proposition. And so I think more than anything else, I was always eager to learn more about different parts of the world. I found US history, pretty boring. And I find it astonishing now that I'm a professional US historian because it's not exactly what I thought I would be doing. I went to sort of see any other part of the world I wanted to know about any other history and society and culture and then the US so that's not to say I wasn't deeply steeped in what was happening in the United States, but I think I was just hungry for learning more. And so I think that curiosity carried with me in different ways. And my college experience was very much I went to Swarthmore College, outside of Philadelphia. And it was a great environment. It was a very interesting progressive community. And I was there from 1994 to 1998.

So in the Reagan era, and it was in some ways the oasis of people who were curious and open and not jingoistic, and America first oriented, which increasingly, a lot of the United States. But my experience, there was also of being maybe one of four or five South Asian Americans. Most of the other students from the subcontinent, were actually they were international students, and many of them were from a pretty elite backgrounds, whether it was from Sri Lanka, or Pakistan, or India or Nepal. And their experiences were obviously very different from mine. But, I think there was a way in which there was a lot of slippage about like, Oh, you're just like someone from India. I've traveled to India, visited India, my grandparents are still there. But I was pretty aware of the fact that on my trips to India, they were pretty clear that I was an American, and I had to agree with them in terms of what I culturally didn't liked. Having said that, I was very interested when I was in college, and learning more about South Asia, about religion and culture and language. I took Hindi classes at the University of Pennsylvania, I started studying colonial Indian history, and really about the nationalist movement. I studied to religion classes on Islam and Hinduism and Buddhism, just to get some sort of familiarity with what not just what my parents had tried to impart to me or what people in our community had shared, but some real knowledge about how people lived and what they thought what they did, what they created. And so I think I was in that really important exploratory phase. And it was really important for me to do that. I mean, I studied a lot of different things in college. I eventually majored in history, I think I was an economics major for a long time until I got a little tired of it. But I minored in economics, I minored in religion, I had a concentration in Asian studies. So that was my eclectic background. During the time I was in college, I sort of created sort of a do it myself, study abroad program. In India, I took classes and met with people in Delhi Jawaralal, Nehru University, which actually was a graduate university and I had no business being there. I don't know how I talked myself into it. I also talked myself into lots of things when I was in India. Like going into archives, I was not supposed to be in this graduate and stuff like that. But I was really interested in the anti-colonial struggle, I wanted to know more about how people sort of came to terms with the domination of the British how they tried to win independence for themselves. I was really fascinated with the story, before we get to Gandhi, in the Congress Party, what were the different movements that were going on in the late 19th century, early 20th century, I was really compelled by research I was doing on understanding the history of famine and hunger in India, and what kind of catastrophe was colonialism was creating in India and how that was also shifting people's ideas about wanting to have a kind of an idea of self-rule. Now, self-rule in India before the British came was monarchies and feudal lords and stuff like that. So a lot of pageantry and a lot of crazy behavior and nefarious stuff going on. But, but not, shall we say really noble stuff, you could really feel like, oh, wow, I really want to know what happened here. So I studied a great deal about or read up on, interviewed people who are involved in the movement, particularly people that were really influenced by Gandhi. I interviewed some people who were really active in 1930s. And I did that interviewing sort of ad hoc, I went from village to village, I was really trying to understand what was behind people's ideas about economic self reliance, and how that was a kind of core of ideas about how people thought about what it meant to be independent.

And so it meant I went to a lot of villages, I left the cities, which was really great. I got to meet a lot of different people, I also discovered in that process that I was learning from people who had been in prison a long time. And interesting enough, engaged in all kinds of different kinds of protests that were non violent, but incredibly bold and courageous stuff. I could never imagine how difficult it was to do. I want to just sort of encapsulate the time there. In terms of I spend time in India, I came back, I was involved in lots of anti racism stuff that was on campus. And a lawsuit that was at first about trying to create different kinds of community and understanding about racial stereotyping and misapprehensions that were impacting African American students on campus, but it also became a way of talking through what many of us who are Asian American were also experiencing the kind of invisibility or stereotyping about our capabilities, or what our experiences where our lives were. And so I think because it was a peer led thing, where we went to different dorm halls and people talked about their experiences, I think I revealed a lot more about moments in which I experienced discrimination, or I experienced something both overt and covert what we might now call microaggressions. But I think it was really important for me to reflect on that I still was very oriented towards the rest of the world. And in fact, I think it's really important to say that my understanding of South Asian American and Asian American experience has always been globally oriented. I've never been singularly thought about encasing ourselves into the boundary of the United States. I've been really interested in all the connections, the contrasts between people living migrating in different parts of the world, or systems of thinking that might follow you from one place to another.

And I'll give you a couple of examples of that. So it's important for me to sort of say that the year after I graduated from college, I had a Watson fellowship. I was looking at Indian immigrant communities, in different parts of the world, I went to England and South Africa, Kenya, I was planning to get to Trinidad and I never made it. But I was looking at how people live multi generationally in places where were South Asian, rather, and marked as such in, but their experiences were so different. In the United States, where I lived in Silver Spring, and even in Philadelphia. People noted my difference, but they weren't quite clear about it. I wasn't stereotyped. This was not in the same kind of way, as someone who's Chinese American or African American, so it was really important that when I went to England, I discovered, oh, my gosh, I'm marked as Asian as a Paki. In South Africa it was very clear, they would look at me and they’re like “Are you sure you have no relatives? In South Africa? What are you doing in apartheid, South Africa”. And even saying that I was American was so weird to them. They're like, “Oh, you're Indian. Maybe you're from Britain, or Kenya or India, but not from the United States”. So, in England, I experienced the fact that I could open my mouth and I was a Yank. And people certainly, attention went down. Or people were just curious and not hostile. In South Africa, it was nonnegotiable. You were marked as your race and you have to live in certain places. In Apartheid, South Africa, you go on train compartments and only be in one section. I think the only place that was different was when I was flying. And I realized, oh, in flying, you're not segregated by race, but everywhere else, things were kind of segregated by race. And yet people floated around. I did when I was in South Africa, but it was It's interesting when I went to protests where it was a very good chance that you could be arrested. The people I was with, and this organization Durban Housing Action Committee would always tell me to bring my passport. They were like “if something happens, you need to be deported. You're not going to be in detention. You need to be able to have an exit strategy” And I thought, no, no, I don't want to do that I want to be just like you. And they're like, “you're not just like us, you are not here. You have struggled in the United States when you're going to return that you need to be part of”. And that was a really important message.

So I returned to United States, I went to study at the University of Chicago, I was going to study South Asian history and colonial African and Asian History more generally. But the plan was really to do that. And the first year I got there, Chicago is super segregated. I just don't belong in Philly, and in the Southside of Chicago, as well. And I think it just made me feel like I needed to explore different things here. And I need to sort of figure different things out. So, during that time, I was already figuring all sorts of different things out for myself. I had been sort of inching to coming out as gay for some time, and I did during this whole transition period, out of college. But when I got to Chicago, it was 1989, I was out from the get-go. It's the middle of the AIDS crisis and a lot of my activism was a combination of stuff with gay and lesbian community and HIV activism. On campus around domestic partnership, politics, and getting people to be recognized in the communities and kin that they have. My academic work shifted, it became studying the United States, because I had this amazing Professor Tom Holt, who completely made me see how extraordinary trying to think about race and inequality was in the United States. And I learned so much and opened up a gateway and I kept on learning about. So I kept on sort of thinking about comparative race studies and feminism and sexuality. I learned a lot about it, everything was really new. Again, I never took a US History course while I was in college, I refuse to. I took early modern Europe, modern China, South Africa, anything but US history.

But when I got to grad school, I started moving into studying race and gender in the US. And that's where it began it became my expertise. And it developed out of the stuff I was doing there. I didn't really recognized myself and it didn't seem visible that I was thinking about Asian American Studies, until I started doing a research project about health and hygiene about race in San Francisco. And I just, I moved into this project just by doing all kinds of library research, and then archival stuff. I wrote a long paper, I don't know, it's like 70 pages long, something ridiculous. But it was this research paper that really helped me it was the basis of my book Contagious Divides, which ended up something I continued to work on for a number of years. But at that moment, I was consumed with learning more and more about Asian American history. And there's no one here that teaches that. What am I going to do? And I thought about the idea of transferring to Berkeley, and going there. And I had this long conversation with Ron Takaki, and ask him about my research saying. Okay you're finishing your qualifying exams, you've got great training. Why would you come here to do anything but your research, just do your research here? Well, I'll talk to you. You're becoming a scholar out in the world by just the stuff that you're doing and working on. And Elaine Kim actually came, I think, a couple years later to Chicago. I've met a bunch of people that when I did research in the Bay Area, but I also experienced some really amazing scholars who really helped me see that like a lot of the learning about Asian America Studies was stuff that we need to do on our own. We could do on our own, we could guide each other and help each other. So I had a really great friend, Patricia Chu, who was an English Department. There are a couple other people that were in different departments that were interested.

We just kept on teaching each other, we kept on like sharing books and reading. It wasn't enough sometimes. But ended up teaching an adult education class on Asian American and African American writers, feminist writers. And it's all because I read all that stuff. And I wanted to teach it and it was a class of these women who were in their 50s and 60s, it was kind of wild in Chicago to be doing that. And we would just have great discussions about the work that I was learning and passionate about and thinking about one more thing, so South Asian community, my activism with South Asian community, and my connection to it in Chicago and beyond during that period of time, was really focused on gay feminist and artists communities. And I got really lucky, I got connected to some people in Chicago.

But more importantly, I got connected to some people in Toronto, there's this amazing conference, it started off Salaam, Toronto, and it became Desh Pardesh. And it was this amazing festival of South Asian artists, activists doing work in the diaspora. So I met through that all these amazing filmmakers and writers from Pratibha Parmar to Shyam Selvadurai and we all were doing interesting work, I contributed my own stuff on trying to understand how South Asian, gay and lesbian activism began in the diaspora, and then was impacting what was happening on the subcontinent. So I wrote up the essay “Sexuality, Identity, and the Use of History” that while I was a graduate student, that actually is probably one of the things that is often most read by undergraduates, I still run into undergraduates who say they've read that essay, in some class or another. Because it was meant for a public audience, it was meant to be accessible. It was about how do people connect before the internet? Through newsletters and letter writing and phone calls? How do they get to know each other across the globe, and try to understand how to create community in their localities, but also to imagine community more broadly. Okay, so all of that is just a sort of setting the scene for what happens to me professionally.

So as you probably are already aware, just by getting a PhD in anything doesn't guarantee you anything. It doesn't guarantee you a position or a job. It's not necessary that you will teach in universities. And just as today people are like why are you doing a PhD in the humanities, you'll never get a job. That was the same thing we were told in the 80s and 90s. Except for these changes began to happen in the mid 90s that we're pushing universities to have to deal with areas and fields that they previously thought, oh we don't really need that. And it was really because of a lot of student demand and activism that was going on. So I applied for a lot of different jobs for the job that came to me and I, you know that this first interview I had on campus was at the State University of New York at Binghamton, and I had no idea where that was.

And I flew in from Chicago, on the top of a mountain essentially is when they have the airport. And its really small airport and the chair of the department of history departments is bringing me down. And in the car, it explains to me why this position exists. And I learned more about it during my visit students, Asian American students, the Asian student union, organized with the African Americans, Black Student Union and Puerto Rican student groups. They set it on the president's office at Binghamton, I think in December 1993. After leading a campaign, trying to force the question of Asian American Studies, in addition to other kinds of scholarly studies on campus, there's already African American studies scholars on campus establishing programs but nothing in Asian American Studies, and demographically, Binghamton was a changing really dramatically. By the time I arrived there and 1995, fully 18% of the undergraduate population was of Asian descent 18%, it had been 5% like 4% 3%, like just in the 80s, huge change occurred, which is really telling you a lot about immigration. And most of the students come from the New York metropolitan area, and how that had shifted, who was coming into Binghamton and what they wanted from their education. And so that's in led to a short term hire a one year higher in the history department, the only department that was willing to say, oh, yeah, we should hire an an Asian American Studies scholar, and they hired John Chang, for a year. And then they were going to advertise a tenure track position. So I applied for the tenure track position. John had already been there for a couple of months. But he had decided he was going on to another university. And so I interviewed and amazingly, I hadn't finished my PhD. But amazingly, they offered me the job. And then they told me, I had a deadline of like eight days to say yes to the job or no to the job. Maybe it was 10 days, I don't know. But it was like the Governor Pataki was going to be coming into office, he was Republican. And he was going to he had already warned that he was going to stop all hiring everywhere in the state university system in the state government. So true to word I mean, I think I accepted like on December 30. And on January 1, he didn't hire anyone, and no one got hired at the university as a faculty member for another two or three years. Oh, before I arrived, I went back to Binghamton. And I actually meet more of the students because I had come in December, I met a few students, but it really the school term was over and we're dealing with exams and people gone home, so only a few undergraduate students there. But they an Asian empowerment conference. And I spoke a little bit, but I really want to just find out who they were and what they were interested in and what people were passionate about, and I realized everyone was interested in so many different things, every field of study, but they really wanted to know what Asian American contributions were how to think about inequity, how to think about creativity, how to think about social and economic life, they want to know a little bit about the larger context of their lives. And they want to know about other people's lives, not their own. So that was really cool. I also met a lot of students still, who were activists that were in the Black Student Union, the feminist women's group, there were some Latino students as well.

And my subsequent time at Binghamton, so I was the first person ever hired as an Asian American Studies scholar, as a system professor, a tenure track I was, that year, I just turned 29. And all the professors in my department were 45-50 or older. So it was like a little surreal. They're my colleagues. Now, they're really they're their whole generation. And then they are my bosses. So I better watch out there. But they were very generous and very kind. Actually, they didn't quite know exactly what to do with me, but they let me do whatever I wanted. I taught the Asian American History every year. And I taught an advanced Asian American Studies class at some time or another, I could choose a theme. And then they allowed me to teach graduate courses and other fields and stuff like that, or whatever field I wanted. But the Asian historians didn't know exactly what to do with me. And the American historians were like, happy I was there, but didn't quite know exactly what. So I got to play around, which was great. The thing that was important, though, I had some latitude with my teaching, because what was really difficult at Binghamton was all the student groups, and there were so many. They wanted a piece of me in the nicest possible way. I mean, they just wanted to hear me talk about whatever topic they wanted me to talk about. And I guess I had just constantly been invited to all their programs and I would help organize film festivals and I was doing a lot of work those first couple years, it was really exhausting. It was fun. People have good energy, but it was exhausting. John Chafee was the chair of the History Department, which was really lucky for me, he was a Chinese historian. He was super cool. He was very supportive of this. And in fact, it was him that was instrumental in supporting Asian American Studies on campus, which subsequently was able to happen more. I took the leave of absence, I had a fellowship at NYU, I had a fellowship at Irvine, so it's gone for about a year and a half 1997 to 1998, which, it was unfortunate for the students who got used to having me around all the time. But I think I needed the time to actually do my research and writing, which I was able to do, and I was able to complete the book. But when I came back, the good news was that they had started hiring again. And in the English department, Lisa Yun, who is a scholar of Chinese, in the Caribbean, in Cuba, and in Jamaica, she was hired into the department. So it was like, Oh, good. I have someone else now, who's with us in like developing the big field of Asian American studies, but they're just two of us. For a long time, I guess you might have some other questions for me about maybe that time or some of the other support that was happening?

Divya Aikat (31:50)
Yeah. So thank you so much for sharing, you have such a wonderful background and have been so many places that you mentioned earlier, you were talking about the different labels that you were assigned, versus the ones that you claimed, and how that also differed in the different nations that you are operating in. And we think something important that you highlighted was that there's this kind of individualized quest for identity that a lot of us embark on and trying to understand our location as Asian Americans and as South Asian Americans, that's something very specific. And I really liked how you tied it back to your community. And that's something that in our work with Asian American Studies and pushing for that there's a lot of that community is a lot of what drives us. And so, we talked about how there's often large spaces of the queer community and women led movement. So there's a lot of this happening. And I wanted to know, how have you found spaces of community within this work? And how have those spaces benefited or changed your view of this work and prevented burnout? How does it sustain you? And where have you found those?

Nayan Shah (33:07)
Yeah, that's a great question. So I feel that communities are very layered in different ways. And they have some very interesting ways in which they don't mingle. And there's different ways in which they intersect. They often intersect in our own lives, right in different ways. So I would be remiss to say…I grew up in a very specific and robust Indian American Gujrati community, my parents were very involved in all sorts of organizations, they started many of them in the Washington Metropolitan Area. And they worked on religious organization. My father worked for a set of conferences for the first Indian American political organizations in DC. So I had all that around me and so I was part of it. And yet feeling a little apart from it, in the sense that I had those kind of traditional set of structures, and also some innovative ones, too, for sure. But I think what really sustained me that must have supported me in many different ways when I was growing up. But what sustained me more when I was in my 20s were the very specific, like people who were in queer, feminist, progressive political communities, artistic communities. And by being in New York, even in upstate New York, I was connecting to people in Toronto and in New York City and in Chicago, and San Francisco. That was really important that kept me going in because it was sort of it felt more like level of comfort. Support, then very traditional heteronormative, focused on success in a particular kind of way community, which I clearly was part of. And I am no slouch in that in the sense that like I have been successful, professionally, maybe in the area not anticipated by people who are looking for physicians and engineers and accountants, but nonetheless, I think it was really important to feel like, Oh, this is a place, where did I feel a sense of refuge, or where did I feel safe? Also when I got to upstate New York, and I was like, oh my gosh, Asian American Studies, I've never taken an Asian American History class. I'm teaching it? I'm the expert now? I mean, how is this happening? That was very daunting. But I discovered, I was really lucky that sometime in the 1990s, Cornell University was actually a real center of Asian American Studies. Gary Okihiro's leadership was extraordinary. He started with a number of other scholars like the East of California Network, which was a network of Asian American Studies. Under undergraduates that were interested in graduate students that were working on East Asian American Studies, young faculty. And that was really supportive of both the student movements that were percolating across campuses in the Midwest and in the Northeast, and demands for Asian American Studies, and sustaining and helping support that. They had conferences and workshops, and all kinds of different networking opportunities. It was also really important for us junior faculty who were like swimming in our own institutions, and sometimes when they were drowning. So the East of California Network was really great for connecting us to each other. And so we could share, we could let our hair down, we could share whatever problems and challenges we were having, whatever impostor syndrome, fears that we had, creative ideas about. When people were asking us for programming ideas on campus. We would connect with each other. And that was another thing I did.

When I was at Binghamton. I already started to make a series of events in Chicago, and I was definitely going to do it and being able leverage any little bit of resource you can to invite a filmmaker, bring a fiction or poet, writer to campus, bring activists to campus, bring scholars to campus, and just work with your network to say, it's not a lot of money, and kind of crazy to come out here. But I'll show you a really great time. Try help people who I believed in sharing their work. So, that led to some really amazing stuff. I mean Gayatri Gopinath gave and came and gave an amazing talk at Binghamton, which helped rethink for many of the kids there, like what they were seeing in Bollywood music, you know, Choli Ke Peeche means had this beautiful rendition of it. Pratibha Parmar came and showed her films or early stuff. There were activists that came that were doing work on anti Asian violence or on domestic violence and shelters for women and children in the New York metropolitan area. There were people that came and were really interested and importantly, doing work on economic justice issues for people who were taxicab drivers and trying to bring all that into the like, once as an assistant professor, you can feel like you don't have enough power. But you have plenty of power leverage if you just sort of trying to persuade people who are already open to we need something new to try to make that happen. So the student groups were really great for that. Your administration organization, the Equal Opportunity Office, folks there were very helpful. And we did a lot of stuff. I ran a whole film festival, I showed all kinds of films for a whole semester. It was exhausting. But it was a lot of fun. Because a lot of people came that had nothing to do with the classes I was teaching, they were just people in the community that came. And it was just the free fun thing to do. And so I think there was lots of ways in which, and I wish I could have had even a greater budge. It would have been great to bring in musicians out, would have been wonderful to have people connect to all kinds of different, art making and creation, but the art making of the creation, it's the people that are creating different ways of seeing and knowing the world that totally sustain me. And so connecting with them, over the phone, over the internet, actually doing stuff during in person activity is really great. With burnout, gauge New York City and getting to Toronto, and just doing whatever I wanted was also really helpful. Binghamton was a really small town, I'd be at the shopping at the grocery store, on the street, and people would know who I was in a way that I'm like "I don't know, you, but you seem to know me". It's just a funny thing to be in that kind of environment. And I think over time, it's something that of course, I think I embrace more.

But I think at first it's like really hard to deal with, with where you don't have any friends, you're completely new there. The only reason you're there is for a job. And you have this sort of status in like, you're supposed to be some sort of model for people or a mentor for people. And how should I put it? Not everything I do is like really made for public presentation. Right? So to sort of navigate that was something having said that, I had lots of really good friends there was really lucky, both a community of graduate students, advanced graduate students and faculty and other people in the community, were really great. Binghamton, who knew had this amazing long standing feminist art community, huge lesbian community, like lesbians are everywhere. And there's also another thing that was actually kind of sweet, I was like, adopted by all these lesbians, Oh, poor little boy, what to do with him. That was sweet. I mean, sometimes it had something to do with the university, but didn't always.

There's also a huge refugee community of Vietnamese refugee community, in the surrounding towns around things. And so I ended up doing the number of different things that were related to helping refugee kids helping connect people to, I brought people to, I mean, some of those really kind of very ad hoc, it was when people were having problems with health care, or access like that, or were having problems with like, getting their kids into after school programs or like that. It wasn't that hard, because of small face to face community, to connect people who could help them. So connecting people who are social workers because social work students were really great trying to connect people, students who wanted to do volunteer activity, but didn't know what they wanted to do, how they could make a difference. So those were small things that sort of happened organically, in different ways. I wouldn't take credit for any of them. Really, it was just that I was in a face to face community. And I was out and about, and I had visibility. And so when people would see me and ask about something, I could probably find out pretty quickly, someone else that could be of help. And I think people were always trying to figure out how to be people wanting to be connected. And they didn't quite know how to be connected. So I think itt sometimes doesn't take very much to do that work. It is exhausting. it doesn't always go well. And then you feel really bad about oh, that connection didn't really happen or was like that. But I think I had to learn a little bit about not trying to do the intention, and trying to make the connection but not responsible for everything that happens. I wasn't running a nonprofit. I was not a social worker. I'm certainly not a psychologist. At best I can help people get to people that might be able to help them. But I can't necessarily guarantee it's going to work. And that's those are tough lessons to learn. Fortunately, I don't think there were any instances where anyone got really in terrible harm. So I'm lucky because I think there's always that thing. And this happens in universities a lot, where you're trying to help people, particularly students, but also other people that you meet staff people and stuff like that, and you don't have the expertise. And something can go really badly if you just don't help someone get to a professional who can really help them. And so I think that was the other part about being in a place like Binghamton was that visibility I had meant that people would come up to me with expectations that I could help guide them somewhere. And I think that I learned, I need to connect to resources. And so therefore, I did things I would never have done normally. I would not necessarily connect to Korean Christian minister, no, not necessarily, I wouldn't go out and do that. But it turned out to be really helpful, that I learned about a minister that was in a town a couple blocks, a couple towns away, that helped a number of students that were that needed certain kinds of guidance, social workers, medical doctors, other people as well, psychologists, but it sort of is this multifaceted role.

And I can only say, my father just recently passed away last passed away in December, my father's a big person in this community and made a big difference. A lot of people always came to him for advice and guidance. And he brought a lot of things to his community. And I think there's something of that model that tried to take on, as a role or responsibility, I have to say that, fortunately, recognize that early in my 20s, that you can't do it all. And that you had to build connections and community that sustain you, as well as trying to help the people around you. So I tried to do a bunch of combinations. In 1999, when opportunities started strongly emerging, or leaving Binghamton, I was open to the idea of being in a major city, not a small town. And not being a small university. And where there were people. So I had two job offers one at University of Pennsylvania, and the other at the University of California, San Diego, I knew I met had met a number of people at San Diego and a number of people at the university there who I thought were amazing. But it was a lot to move all the way to California, although I think it was open to it. As it turned out that's where I went. And I got tenure with my appointment before I arrived, which made life really nice and sure was held a lot better than going to University of Pennsylvania and being exploited and abused, which professors have been at University of Pennsylvania. I think that's changing. But you know, back in the day, people of color and women in particular, were just roundly exploited. And it was a really tough place to be. So there were quality of life decisions that I was making, moving out to California. And it also did change.

You are both UNC students at the moment of really propelling movement for Asian American studies on your campus. And I think that's amazing. And I think it was amazing that the undergraduate students that were about that at Binghamton, and they did create the grounds for things to happen. But a lot of things had to change on the administrative level and in faculty departments to make that possible. So I'll tell you what changed really radically at Binghamton. I left in 2000. Lisa Yun was still there, which is great. She and John Chafee wrote a grant from the Freeman foundation, the foundation whose fortune comes from selling insurance to China -- business insurance in the 1920s. 30s and 40s and became I think the big insurance conglomerate. But anyway, the family is very committed to Asia and committed to China and Japan and Taiwan, and stuff like that. And they have this Foundation, which supports Asian Studies and Asian American studies. They accepted a $1.7 million grant from Binghamton at that time. It was interesting because it was a public university, it wasn't Wesleyan, which is where many people in the Freeman Foundation have their ancestors have gone there. It supported the establishment of Asian American Studies and Asian Studies in a bunch of different departments and seated money to support the line for a number of years. And then expected the university to commit to it and to hire people if the first person didn't get hired. So I often joke that I left Binghamton and then they hired five people to replace me. It's kind of true, it wasn't because I left Binghamton, it was because of the transformation that also occurred, but the need was definitely there. And people recognized it. But departments had to be given lots of incentives, to hire people in sociology and art history and in English and in political science. And what you see now at Binghamton, in terms of the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, was built out of that effort. Not the same scholars are there that were hired at that time, but it just sort of built a broad buy in from all kinds of people for Asian American Studies, or Asian diasporic studies, in relationship to Asian Studies. And that's the model that they were able to use. Other universities and departments and colleges have used a kind of American Studies, Ethnic Studies model, sort of, let's diversify what that means include Asian American Studies expertise. Binghamton uses this model, and it used these resources to do that. So it's a really interesting and important element of what got started. So I think that my time there, I can see was like laying ground for different things. So because I taught like seminars on Asian diaspora, cultural politics, looking at using film and literature to help think about social issues, both in Asian communities in the United States and in Britain, for instance. I taught advanced classes in sort of thing about Asian American visual studies and community. They were one of classes I taught, but it helped build some ground and some idea that there's enough work out there, there's enough scholarship out there. But at a certain point, I couldn't keep on doing it.

Christina Huang (53:22)
Thank you so much for being so vulnerable and sharing, like all these experiences. It's incredible sitting here listening to your input. Sometimes it amazes me while listening, like you were able to do so much in such a little time. You were able to travel the world, you set up the framework for SUNY Binghamton and kind of propelled the movement that they had there. And you were truly like, I think you crave that desire for passionate engagement and that desire for visceral solidarity. And I'm very curious to learn more about if you could provide some insight about how your South Asian identity is perceived or underrepresented, in relation to your activism in Asian American Studies? And specifically, I'm interested in like the visibility or the invisibility of your South Asian identity.

Nayan Shah (54:17)
Yeah. That's a great question. First of all, I thought it was really important and interesting, and it was always very curious to people that my first book and my first body of research is actually about Chinese American community. And what someone who is a South Asian American, as opposed to someone who's Chinese or white, can say about it, because that was sort of the expectation. And I think that that's really helpful to make me visible in some way as in terms of my identity. What I bring to the interest and passion, I bring to the scholarship That isn't an exact exploration of my personal identity.

But it's a reflection about how racism can be perpetuated in different ways or how inequity can be perpetuated through ideas about disease, dirt and hygiene and about domestic life and gender and sexuality. So that's what I did in that in that way. But the second project I moved on that led to the book, Stranger Intimacy was about South Asian migrants in the early 20th century. And I had started that research at about the same time I was at Binghamton. And I think actually took a couple of research trips to California and the Pacific Northwest, that helped me build the basis of that with what later became that research and it was really interesting to me to think about South Asian migrants, mostly Punjabi men, some Afghani Gujarati, some Bengali, who migrated in the early 20th century and their interracial relationships with both men and women.

So really trying to think about what and then realize that people who weren't highly educated. Many of them had very basic literacy. And so they didn't leave a lot of documentation, except for when they got caught by government apparatus. So, policing and court cases, was a lot of what I found, which revealed, when I was able to see a lot of the transcripts of appealed cases that showed a lot of complexity to people's lives and how they were trying to explain who they were and who they loved, or what they were passionate about what they believed in, and also what they were fighting, in terms of how they were being treated. So that was a really important book, it was perhaps the first of now several South Asian American histories that were written by South Asian Americans. And I think that changed a little bit of the visibility of where South Asian American Studies sits in Asian American studies, I think of the work that a number of us have done: Seema Sohi, Vivek Bald, myself. There are lots of different scholars in literature and cultural studies, as well. And we all kind of know each other socially as well. Pawan Dhingra, I mentioned Gayatri Gopinath before, but there's so many other folks that we can think about here. All their work is like really expanding who it is that speaks up and for Asian American Studies, who can be an authority of some kind, who's creative energy is important to know. And I think it's happening at the same time. And it's growing interestingly, over the last two decades about the number of Asian Americans who are of South Asian descent, who are in popular culture and media, many of whom, this is a kind of fun fact, or fun anecdote. Many of the people who are these comedy artists or folks who are become very well-known now in Hollywood media and on TV. They've often reached out to many of us about trying to understand, how do I understand this particular history or the story or the context of what's going on? And it's kind of cool to sort of realize it doesn't have a one-to-one correspondence to like some work that they're doing, isn't based on anyone's book, but there are some sensibilities that are built in to that show. Because the creator is in touch with people creating work. And that's also true for comic artists that and stand up comedy in particular, that's very much true for people who are doing more popular oriented work. So I feel like what's important is that we're just generating creative thinking, storytelling, different perspectives, different voice. And we're following whatever our passions are.

So I didn't follow up with another book about South Asian Americans after Stranger Intimacy. It was exhausting doing it. I was happy with that circulation. It's a strange book, it's very particular, it's going to have its niche audience. But ended up then doing a whole project on hunger strikes, that isn't necessarily, there are elements of Asian American inflected, it was my opportunity to talk about Japanese who are incarcerated in camps. During World War II, it was my opportunity to think about refugees that are struggling with recognition and protesting their detention. In a contemporary moment, it was my opportunity to go back and think about South Africa, and the apartheid struggle when I was there. That book was inspired by the time that I was in South Africa, and I witnessed hunger strikes, that was also like connecting back to my interest in Indian colonial history. So I feel like we constantly do these different kinds of creative projects, that if we're open to them, and we're allowing ourselves to explore them, we end up illuminating something really important, about point of view or perspective and approach. I'm right now finishing up an article about Filipino immigrants in the 1920s, and romancing at dance halls and parties in Alaska and Seattle. And I'm trying to understand how people socialized at that time. And one of the arguments I'm coming up with is that people are mixing and mingling with all kinds of different people in all kinds of different ways that are following expectations of gender and transgressive of it in different ways. But we keep on looking for people to be in couples. And we, if we don't see them in couples, we're like, ah, didn't happen. Nothing happened here. But what's interesting is that people were in all sorts of very interesting communities where they were entangled with each other in different kinds of groups that kept on changing, depending on the space, they were in whether they were at a cannery in Alaska, or at a dance hall in Seattle. And if we stopped looking for a couple, we might discover people have lots of different relationships, it's probably like college. It’s interesting to see that in a way that's been something 100 years ago, where I'm looking at photography of peoples’ stories and accounts.

So all that's to say, there's more visibility of South Asian American Studies and scholars in Asian American studies over the last 15 years. It is something that is going to have to continue to grow in different ways. And it's unpredictable, I'll sort of explain that for a moment. It's always interesting retrospectively, to see who it's really motivated by a particular form of learning or a particular kind of inquiry. And at the time, people might say, "oh, I'm the only one that's doing this". And over time, they might discover there's a cluster of people. But these clusters happen and congeal in different ways. So they're, sometimes we call them inactive academia cohort. But like, you could sort of mark that there's kind of a cohort of South Asian American scholars who have done important work in South Asian American Studies. And they've achieved a kind of visibility. Many of us graduated from PhDs about 1994 to about 2003. There are a few more people coming down the pike, for sure. But that's an intense cluster of people, you can if you did a bibliography of important publications in South Asian American studies, I guarantee you, most of us have finished our PhDs during that decade. How did that happen? Like, why didn't it happen? That's still a question that maybe someone like you will be able to investigate and figure out. But it tells you that something precious happened, and a bunch of different institutions simultaneously about what people want to understand and learn. All those people that are you could probably name like, five or six, Asian American, South Asian, you could just five or six South Asian comic artists who have made it at a pretty high level right now. Right? Yeah, going to college and now most of them are in their 40s. They're all about that age, late 30s, into the mid 40s. But they all went to college, and they all went to grad school around this, if they went to grad school, or whatever they end up do, they ended up entering career as scholars and professors in Asian American Studies the same age. And so it's like a cluster of people and I'm not sure it always reproduces, I'm not sure that there's another cohort that's coming, or it's always going, it's always generating. But there must have been something about what we were stimulated about what we saw as possibilities and the energy we took to write out our, our lives and stories. Think about the fact that right now, there are about four or five, kind of amazing South Asian, YA writers that's about the industry, that industry is now is really cultivating that. But I bet you they're about the same age. And so if you just sort of, it's important to sort of see that because you want what you want to sort of find out what was in the mix in different ways, what networks might have been happening, what possibilities were emerging, that allow them to take an idea and see a possibility to develop a passion because these the development time is really long. Even for someone now really famous, like Mindy Kaling. She's been working at it for two decades. Plus, she hit you know, in a certain kind of way. Maulik Pancholy, who's written a YA book, but it was on TV as well. He's sort of similar kind of process. So it's interesting to sort of see how that's working as a process, because we could also study why is it there are so many Indian doctors in the United States, there's structural reasons for that. There's not only the med school activity that was going on in India, but also these transition ways in which people were able to come to United States, Filipino nurses, similar story. There's something structural happening, there's a lot more people there. So you could really study that. Or as Pawan Dhingra writes about how do we get all these Gujarati motel owners? Why is that happening? Or why so many people running, owning 711 franchises, it's not just out of luck. Cambodians and donut shops, There's some structural stuff that's happening, that's supporting that making it happen. For something in the creative world and for academia. There's probably a smaller subset of people. But it'd be interesting to find out and think about what made them what made this cohort come together, how many of them know each other? And what kind of network of friendship? Do they have a project based work they that they do? That's what supports and sustains the advancement of work out there. So because there's a half dozen of us who are South Asian American, we're all full professors at universities, we help sustain a kind of potential infrastructure of other kinds of research and work. My PhD students are not exclusively Asian American or South Asian, but I will stimulate certain kinds of projects by working with them and they'll or they gravitate to me or whatever. But that's something really important to have to understand. It's even more difficult to absorb when you think all those people who we think of as the South Asian American scholars or Asian American studies scholars, they actually went to universities where they were kind of alone. They may not have had much of a cohort unless they went to UCLA or Berkeley. Chances are they were one offs, there are probably people that went to UNC Chapel Hill, who are now alumni been there, out of there for several years, who are doing important things in Asian American Life, culture politics. It'd be interesting to find out who those people are and what their experiences what, what inspired them, what got them, sustain them, to do what they do. So I mean, those are just some general thoughts about like, how you think about this process of how we regenerate and grow. Because we don't grow in a linear fashion. And exponential growth is not always what's happening. It's very specific clusters of activity. It's the rise of activity that's happening, and people have lots of different ways in which they are inspired.

So I'm going to end with talking about those documentaries that I've been in recently in PBS. So I've been asked to be on various documentaries, the Asian American history one the multi, five different episodes of that, the one on bubonic plague at the Golden Gate in San Francisco in 1900. Did a couple of other things as well. This is one that's coming out also about disease I'm looking at the rough cut of now, those are interesting opportunities that came over time and an invitation to participate based on the research I've done. I've always found it interesting about everyone that's going to be on it. I look at it. Oh, yeah. I expected to see my colleague Mae Ngai on that, or Erika Lee. But then you realize, I know this world, this universe. It's being introduced to the public, but I know who these people are. And sometimes what the job is of those documentaries is really to introduce a set of voices a set of new concerns. The first documentary, I was in a set of people that might be unknown, or less known. The first documentary I was ever in was in 1984, was made in 94. It was called Dirty Laundry. It was a video artist, Richard Fung, who's based in Toronto, who wanted to write about Chinese Canadian migrants and sexuality. And it was historically based and also contemporary. And I was someone who was just chatting with about it. And he invited me out to Babff to be part of that documentary. And what was really interesting is what all the folks that were on, all the people that were on the stage set, watching this interview, go on between Richard and I. They thought what was most amazing about it say that whole bunch of experts come in lots of really great people. I was like, the youngest, the unknown one, the one from the United States. So what are you doing inviting a United States person to Canada?

Richard and I had such a rapport, we were like finishing each other's sentences, it was going very easily. It's because we had been having a conversation that helped germinate his idea that this was a really viable project. And then he did more research, and he did everything he needed to do. And then he invited me in afterwards. But that's something about that kind of connection of people. When people connect their ideas and their conversation, their passions, they can work things out in multiple mediums. And then that conversation happens easily generatively. And that's something that I find really exciting about this moment. I also find it really important to bring it down to the place you're at.

There are conversations you are having in your community that are generative, they may not always lead to the thing you think you want to happen or must happen, but they're absolutely essential for any kind of change and transformation to occur. So I think it's really important. To realize that we could retrospectively see something different, and it may look because you have a big challenge ahead of you. You're saying you want to go from having couple tenure track faculty members on campus to having six or seven and you want to have a whole major and minor, and there's a lot of stuff that's going on. It's gonna happen on a timescale that exceeds your time at UNC Chapel Hill. But you are part of that conversation that ferments that's making it happen, your questions, your insistence, your learning is making something grow. It's hard to know where it's going to lead.

And wouldn't be lovely to catch up 25 years from now and find out what you two are up to, and all your other partners in crime, Maybe also to understand that maybe the most unlikely people might be the most supportive in the end about Asian American Studies at UNC, you just can't tell. So I just hope you continue to have a really positive attitude about just where you're going and build it out, think strategically take care of yourselves. Don't blame each other for any failures. If things don't work out, because you never know, it could lead to something really important. But I think the hardest thing with any kind of movements, is that people get a little stuck on, it has to be this way, or not at all. And I think it's really important to just be really flexible. And to also appreciate that you're at a movement, so things are going to just move in different ways. And it's just going to be important. The most active Asian American Studies students were the ones that kind of graduated by 1996 at Binghamton. There were other students that were there. But once a couple of faculty members were there.

Divya Aikat (1:17:06)
First of all, I just wanted to thank you so much, you've given such a wonderful overview. And you actually, you ended up weaving through a lot of the questions that we were going to ask you anyways, about student advice and your experience with Asian American Studies. And it's really inspiring to hear. So thank you.

Christina Huang (1:17:26)
That was really insightful, and I was enjoying my time, the entire time I was taking notes. I was like this is such good advice.

Divya Aikat (1:17:33)
I actually asked you just one last question, and the discussion, but you started just doing this work for yourself. And then you became a trailblazer at SUNY Binghamton with the work that you're doing. And you're still furthering this. So I just wanted to ask a broader question of what does it mean to you to be a part of this Asian American Studies movement as a whole?

Nayan Shah (1:17:56)
That's a big question. What is it? I feel like it is a very important community that has been one which I was uncertain, when I first went to my first Asian American Studies conference in 1993, that I would really feel a part of and that was not because people weren't welcoming. They're very welcoming. But I wasn't sure, this is where I was exactly going, I thought, Okay, this is something I'm going to do for a while. And so it's really kind of extraordinary to think it's actually a large part of like, what my life and connection is to other scholars. I'm always interested in branching out and building beyond where I've started, and so I've definitely done my work, my scholarship, and my professional life. But I'm very happy to have found a sustaining home in an Asian American Studies and in the building of both a knowledge project and a kind of community growth project because I think that it's important. I mean, what's important to me, I have a very particular point of view. I really think it's important for us to really reckon with how people have coped with and been resilient towards the sort of inequities and difficulties they faced, by virtue of their lives and their conditions. And to think about that, in relational connection to other people who have had experienced dispossession, exclusion discrimination, but who adapted and transformed who they are. I definitely believe that to be Asian American is to embrace the possibilities of potentials of equity for all and democracy. In all of its manifestations, like African Americans, for instance, who are able to identify where that vision has come short, and are determined to participate, and make sure that we're part of that world. We also have a lot of other multiple identities that may not be encompassed in this is the one thing.

I always sort of find a way of saying that I'm not certain that 25 years from now, we'll be calling this thing, Asian American. And we may actually have another name for it, it may have evolved into something else. It's a very powerful, provisional identity. It's also a fictive identity, we have to believe that it means something, we have to believe South Asian beliefs, something and it's in service of something. And we have to say that about Asian America that is intelligible in some way, or it's an aspiration. But there might be other aspirations that might be more powerful or might be named differently. So I think that's important to keep in mind was we're institutionalizing something and we're trying to also make it really flexible to meet where people were there are. My cousin, Sandeep, who has a podcast: ABCD. standup comic artists improv and stuff like that. Sandeep says that he's just always astonished by how much both joy and resistance he gets when he's sending up something about South Asian culture. He's looking for something that's funny, or that makes a connection. And it has to make it pretty fast for some of them to land something humorous, you have to be able to get it. But it's also true that people get it in a variety of different ways. And I think that's the pleasure that I have. I read fiction books, I see things in movies, where we're no longer explaining everything about South Asian culture, like I just read, I'm reading a novel right now where someone's blithely just saying Khichdi and say, like, I'm just assuming everyone's gonna figure it out. I'm like, "Wow, that's interesting." You know, it's like, the moment where you're inside stuff becomes out there. I think it's just a really interesting prospect just to think about that. We're constantly evolving and changing and transforming in lots of ways. And the number of people who are identify who can be identified as South Asian in the United States, is growing in a level that would be hard to fathom in 1980, it would have been hard to predict in 1990. To imagine that Asia, South Asian, so people are identified as the largest or second largest, or even the third largest demographic route, Asian American, would require a what really are you smoking something like that's not going to happen. It's always going to be a tiny minority. Apparently, now, it's no longer demographically. The question is do people actually feel that way? Culturally, politically, socially? Or are they fracturing in other ways? And it's fine, whatever is happening, we have to make sense of and see what the connections are. But I think it's really important to realize that we're in this rapidly evolving change that we can't always predict and we just have to keep on trying and remaking and reconnecting. If we're going to make anything happen in terms of I would imagine the goal of equity, dignity, respect, affection. That comes from not misunderstanding but actual understanding that comes from a deeper understanding of which I think we're all contributing to, and I hope this oral history and others will contribute to that as well.

Divya Aikat (1:25:29)
Thank you so much this is such a wonderful interview, and you brought up so many really critical points that are going to help us a lot with other interviews and with framing our own lives and our own work at UNC under this Asian American Studies movement, and it's really inspirational to hear about the things that you've been doing and the path that you've taken. So, thank you so much for giving us your time. And talking about all of this.

Nayan Shah (1:25:55)
Such a pleasure.

Christina Huang (1:25:56)
Thank you so much.

Nayan Shah (1:25:58)
Thank you.