Emily Callaci

I am an historian of modern Africa, global feminism and decolonization. My first book, Street Archives and City Life: Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania, explores the creative lives of urban migrant youth to the city of Dar es Salaam during Tanzania’s socialist era, from 1967 through 1985. Drawing together a range of unconventional sources, or “street archives,” my book reveals a world of cultural innovation, literary production, and the elaboration of a distinctly urban subjectivity among migrants and refugees in Dar es Salaam.

My second book Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise is an intellectual and social history of the global Wages for Housework movement from the 1970s.

I am currently working on a third book, provisionally called Planning the African Family, which explores the intersection of decolonization and search for health and reproductive justice in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s-1980s.

I serve as co-editor of the American Historical Review series History Unclassified.

Education

Ph.D., Northwestern University
M.A., Northwestern University
B.A., Kenyon College

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.

Selected Publications

• “Injectable Development:” Depo-Provera and the Mapping of the Global South,” Radical History Review 131, (May 2018).
• “Street Textuality: Socialism, Masculinity and Urban Belonging in Tanzania’s Pulp Fiction Publishing Industry, 1975-1985,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59: 1 (2017).
• “‘Chief Village in a Nation of Villages’: History, Race and Authority in Tanzania’s Dodoma Plan”, (forthcoming, Urban History, 2015).
• “Dancehall Politics: Mobility, Sexuality, and Spectacles of Racial Respectability in Late Colonial Tanganyika, 1930s-1961,” The Journal of African History, 52:3, (2011).

Advisor To

• Carly Lucas
• Fauziyatu Moro
• Elizabeth Mwihaki Richu

Selected Awards

• National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 2018
• American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 2015-16
• UW Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities Residential Fellowship, 2015-16
• UW Madison Center for the Humanities First Book Award, 2013-2014
• Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, 2008-2009
• U.S. Department of Education Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, 2006-2011
• Graduate Research Grant, The Graduate School, Northwestern University, 2007 and 2010

History Courses

• History 105 – Africa Since 1940 – Syllabus 2013 (pdf)
• History 200 – Historical Studies: Global Reproductive Politics – Syllabus 2022 (pdf)
• History 201 – The Historian’s Craft: African Decolonization – Syllabus 2025 (pdf)
• History 201 – The Historian’s Craft: History of Humanitarianism – Syllabus 2023 (pdf)
• History 225 – Globalization and the African City – Syllabus 2015 (pdf)
• History 283 – Gender, Sexuality and the Making of the Self in Modern Africa – Syllabus 2012 (pdf)
• History 330 – Global History of Humanitarianism – Syllabus 2025 (pdf)
• History 500 – The Pill and the World: Family Planning, Population Control and Feminism in World History – Syllabus 2015 (pdf)
• History 600 – Creative Historical Writing – Syllabus 2025 (pdf)
• History 600 – Decolonization and African Nationalism – Syllabus 2013 (pdf)
• History 600 – The Global Anti-Apartheid Movement – Syllabus 2025 (pdf)
• History 705 – Historical Approaches to Race and Reproduction
• History 752 – Seminar in Transnational Gender History: Gender, Women, Sex and Feminism in transnational perspective – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
• History 861 – African Intellectual History – Syllabus 2020 (pdf)
• History 861 – Historical Approaches to the Twentieth Century African City
• History 861 – The African Postcolony