Street Archives and City Life

"Under the revered Nyerere a peculiar dialectic was put in place: a strong villagization and thus anti-city rhetoric in the face of the persistent migration of rural dwellers into the city. This is the focal point of Emily Callaci's Street Archives and City Life, and by exploring this she gives us a distinctive account of the relation between African postcolonial socialist politics, the city of Dar, and the aspirations of the thousands of Tanzanians who flocked to the city. Callaci's book is without a doubt going to be a classic in studies of the African city." — Ato Quayson author of Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism

“Street Archives and City Life is an enormously eloquent contribution to scholarship on the postcolonial politics of gender and the formation of new writing and reading publics. By locating a plethora of Swahili-language sources—ranging from advice booklets and magazines to dance songs and pulp fiction—in the material infrastructures and moral imaginations from which they emerged, Emily Callaci produces a deeply humanizing account of creativity and precarity in 1970s Dar es Salaam.” — Lynn M. Thomas, author of Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya