Emily Callaci

Planning the African Family: Reproductive Politics in the Era of Decolonization

My book, Planning the African Family, tells the story of how African doctors, nurses, social workers, politicians, and patients in the 1960s and 1970s used the resources of family planning in creative and often unintended ways, improvising in the context of scarcity to deliver health and to build health systems. This book rewrites the global history of family planning from the standpoint of Africa—usually neglected in global histories of the family planning movement—shifting the emphasis from narratives of coercion and liberation to a more flexible dynamic of improvisation in the context of enduring global inequality.

Emily Callaci is an historian of modern Africa and global feminism. Her 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. She is the author of a forthcoming book about the global feminist Wages for Housework campaign. Along with Kate Brown, she is co-editor of the AHR series History Unclassified.