Faculty Books
Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise
Emily Callaci. Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise. Penguin UK/Seal USA, 2025.
What would women do with their lives if they had more time? The riveting, untold story of a revolutionary campaign to change the way work is valued ‘The women of the world are serving notice. We want wages for every dirty toilet, every indecent assault, every painful childbirth, every cup of coffee and every smile. And if we don’t get what we want, we will simply refuse to work any longer!’ Across the globe in the 1970s, a network of feminists distilled their struggles into a single demand: Wages for Housework! Today, it remains a provocative idea, and an unfulfilled promise. Here historian Emily Callaci tells the story of this campaign by exploring the lives and ideas of its key creators, tracing their wildly creative political vision over the past five decades: from the early 1970s, when Selma James, a working-class political organizer, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, a scholar-activist, started laying the foundations of Wages for Housework in London and Italy; through philosopher Silvia Federici reframing the campaign in the context of New York City’s fiscal crisis; to Wilmette Brown, lesbian poet and anti-war activist, and Margaret Prescod, community organizer, who brought the insights of Black feminism to the movement. Drawing on new archival research and extensive interviews, Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the movement as it reached across Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean. For these women, the wage was more than a demand for money: it was a starting point for remaking the world as we know it, imagining potential futures under capitalism – and beyond. Then as now, Wages for Housework poses profound questions. What would it be like to live in a society that prioritizes care rather than production? How would this change our relationship with the natural world? And what would women do with their lives if they had more time?
Street Archives and City Life: Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania
Emily Callaci. Street Archives and City Life: Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania. Duke University Press, 2017.
In Street Archives and City Life Emily Callaci maps a new terrain of political and cultural production in mid- to late twentieth-century Tanzanian urban landscapes. While the postcolonial Tanzanian ruling party (TANU) adopted a policy of rural socialism known as Ujamaa between 1967 and 1985, an influx of youth migrants to the city of Dar es Salaam generated innovative forms of urbanism through the production and circulation of what Callaci calls street archives. These urban intellectuals neither supported nor contested the ruling party’s anti-city philosophy; rather, they navigated the complexities of inhabiting unplanned African cities during economic crisis and social transformation through various forms of popular texts that included women’s Christian advice literature, newspaper columns, self-published pulp fiction novellas, and song lyrics. Through these textual networks, Callaci shows how youth migrants and urban intellectuals in Dar es Salaam fashioned a collective ethos of postcolonial African citizenship. This spirit ushered in a revolution rooted in the city and its networks—an urban revolution that arose in spite of the nation-state’s pro-rural ideology. Intro to Street Archives and City Life (pdf) made available courtesy of Duke Press.
Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003
Richard C. Keller. Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Shortlisted for the American Library in Paris Book Award, 2015 In a cemetery on the southern outskirts of Paris lie the bodies of nearly a hundred of what some have called the first casualties of global climate change. They were the so-called abandoned victims of the worst natural disaster in French history, the devastating heat wave that struck in August 2003, leaving 15,000 dead. They died alone in Paris and its suburbs, and were then buried at public expense, their bodies unclaimed. They died, and to a great extent lived, unnoticed by their neighbors–their bodies undiscovered in some cases until weeks after their deaths. Fatal Isolation tells the stories of these victims and the catastrophe that took their lives. It explores the multiple narratives of disaster–the official story of the crisis and its aftermath, as presented by the media and the state; the life stories of the individual victims, which both illuminate and challenge the ways we typically perceive natural disasters; and the scientific understandings of disaster and its management. Fatal Isolation is both a social history of risk and vulnerability in the urban landscape and a story of how a city copes with emerging threats and sudden, dramatic change.
Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World
James Sweet. Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Between 1730 and 1750, powerful healer and vodun priest Domingos Álvares traversed the colonial Atlantic world like few Africans of his time–from Africa to South America to Europe–addressing the profound alienation of warfare, capitalism, and the African slave trade through the language of health and healing. In Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World, James H. Sweet finds dramatic means for unfolding a history of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which healing, religion, kinship, and political subversion were intimately connected.
Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties
Warwick Anderson (Co-editor), Deborah Jenson (Co-editor), and Richard C. Keller (Co-editor). Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties. Duke University Press, 2011.
By the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a technology of both the late-colonial state and anti-imperialism. Insights from psychoanalysis shaped European and North American ideas about the colonial world and the character and potential of native cultures. Psychoanalytic discourse, from Freud’s description of female sexuality as a “dark continent” to his conceptualization of primitive societies and the origins of civilization, became inextricable from the ideologies underlying European expansionism. But as it was adapted in the colonies and then the postcolonies, psychoanalysis proved surprisingly useful for theorizing anticolonialism and postcolonial trauma. Our understandings of culture, citizenship, and self have a history that is colonial and psychoanalytic, but, until now, this intersection has scarcely been explored, much less examined in comparative perspective. Taking on that project, Unconscious Dominions assembles essays based on research in Australia, Brazil, France, Haiti, and Indonesia, as well as India, North Africa, and West Africa. Even as they reveal the modern psychoanalytic subject as constitutively colonial, they shed new light on how that subject went global: how people around the world came to recognize the hybrid configuration of unconscious, ego, and superego in themselves and others. Contributors Warwick Anderson Alice Bullard John Cash Joy Damousi Didier Fassin Christiane Hartnack Deborah Jenson Richard C. Keller Ranjana Khanna Mariano Plotkin Hans Pols
Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda
Neil Kodesh. Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda. University of Virginia Press, 2010.
Winner of the 2011 African Studies Association Herskovits Award, Beyond the Royal Gaze shifts the perspective from which we view early African politics by asking what Buganda, a kingdom located on the northwest shores of Lake Victoria in present-day Uganda, looked like to people who were not of the center but nevertheless became central to its functioning. Drawing on insights from a variety of disciplines—history, historical linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology—Neil Kodesh argues that the domains of politics and public healing were intimately entwined in Buganda from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted throughout Buganda, Kodesh demonstrates how efforts to ensure collective prosperity and perpetuity—usually expressed in the language of health and healing—lay at the heart of community-building processes in Buganda. Kodesh’s work offers a novel approach to the use of oral sources and opens up new possibilities for researching and writing histories of more distant periods in Africa’s past. Beyond the Royal Gaze will appeal to students and scholars of health and healing, political complexity, and the production of knowledge in places where limited documentary evidence exists.
The African Diaspora and the Disciplines
James Sweet, and Tejumola Olaniyan (Co-editor). The African Diaspora and the Disciplines. Indiana University Press, 2010.
Focusing on the problems and conflicts of doing African diaspora research from various disciplinary perspectives, these essays situate, describe, and reflect on the current practice of diaspora scholarship. Tejumola Olaniyan, James H. Sweet, and the international group of contributors assembled here seek to enlarge understanding of how the diaspora is conceived and explore possibilities for the future of its study. With the aim of initiating interdisciplinary dialogue on the practice of African diaspora studies, they emphasize learning from new perspectives that take advantage of intersections between disciplines. Ultimately, they advocate a fuller sense of what it means to study the African diaspora in a truly global way.
Enregistrer les morts, identifier les surmortalités Une comparaison Angleterre, États-Unis et France
Richard C. Keller (Editor), Robert Dingwall (Editor), and Carine Vassy (Editor). Enregistrer Les Morts, Identifier Les surmortalités Une Comparaison Angleterre, États-Unis Et France. Presses de l’EHESP, l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Santé Publique, 2010.
La canicule de 2003, qui a tué 15 000 personnes en France sans que cette surmortalité ait été identifiée rapidement, a suscité des interrogations sur la capacité des pouvoirs publics à dénombrer les morts avec exactitude, à détecter les crises sanitaires et à prévenir l’apparition de drames semblables. Comment enregistre-t-on les morts ? Quelles sont les informations que l’on cherche ainsi à obtenir et dans quels buts ?Pour répondre à ces questions, qui se posent dans tous les pays industrialisés, quatre sociologues et un historien se sont intéressés aux modalités d’enregistrement de la mortalité en Angleterre, aux États-Unis et en France. Leur étude montre que ces modalités reflètent des choix de société, plus ou moins anciens, qui diffèrent d’un pays à l’autre. Pourquoi les Français sont-ils obsédés par la confidentialité des causes de la mort ? Pourquoi les Anglais pratiquent-ils vingt fois plus d’autopsies qu’en France ? Comment les Américains inscrivent-ils l’enregistrement des morts dans la lutte contre le terrorisme ? En principe, les trois pays produisent des données de mortalité similaires, susceptibles de faire l’objet de comparaisons internationales. En pratique, les modes de construction de l’information sont très variables, et les préoccupations de santé publique sont loin d’être prioritaires.
Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa
Richard C. Keller. Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Nineteenth-century French writers and travelers imagined Muslim colonies in North Africa to be realms of savage violence, lurid sexuality, and primitive madness. Colonial Madness traces the genealogy and development of this idea from the beginnings of colonial expansion to the present, revealing the ways in which psychiatry has been at once a weapon in the arsenal of colonial racism, an innovative branch of medical science, and a mechanism for negotiating the meaning of difference for republican citizenship. Drawing from extensive archival research and fieldwork in France and North Africa, Richard Keller offers much more than a history of colonial psychology. Colonial Madness explores the notion of what French thinkers saw as an inherent mental, intellectual, and behavioral rift marked by the Mediterranean, as well as the idea of the colonies as an experimental space freed from the limitations of metropolitan society and reason. These ideas have modern relevance, Keller argues, reflected in French thought about race and debates over immigration and France’s postcolonial legacy.
Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770
James Sweet. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Exploring the cultural lives of African slaves in the early colonial Portuguese world, with an emphasis on the more than one million Central Africans who survived the journey to Brazil, James Sweet lifts a curtain on their lives as Africans rather than as incipient Brazilians. Focusing first on the cultures of Central Africa from which the slaves came–Ndembu, Imbangala, Kongo, and others–Sweet identifies specific cultural rites and beliefs that survived their transplantation to the African-Portuguese diaspora, arguing that they did not give way to immediate creolization in the New World but remained distinctly African for some time. Slaves transferred many cultural practices from their homelands to Brazil, including kinship structures, divination rituals, judicial ordeals, ritual burials, dietary restrictions, and secret societies. Sweet demonstrates that the structures of many of these practices remained constant during this early period, although the meanings of the rituals were often transformed as slaves coped with their new environment and status. Religious rituals in particular became potent forms of protest against the institution of slavery and its hardships. In addition, Sweet examines how certain African beliefs and customs challenged and ultimately influenced Brazilian Catholicism. Sweet’s analysis sheds new light on African culture in Brazil’s slave society while also enriching our understanding of the complex process of creolization and cultural survival.