Abstract
Emily Callaci’s Street Archives and City Life: Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania explores a variety of texts—didactic booklets aimed at young women, pulp fiction novellas, and song lyrics—both as the carriers of moral messages and social commentary and as the artifacts manifesting particular ways of making a life in Tanzania’s preeminent city, Dar es Salaam. A notable strength of the book is its treatment of these sources not only as reflective and productive of a particular moral imagination but also as inextricably entangled in the making of material gender positionalities through the material and reputational economies involved in the creation of these texts. The book is shaped by the argument of Andrew Ivaska’s Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam (2011), which shows city life as a crucible of debates about, and struggles over, gender norms and relations. Within the empirical terrain of these struggles mapped out in that treatment, Callaci focuses her lens on new quarters—in particular on the lifeworld of Dar es Salaam’s dancehalls and the city’s milieu of a bohemian set of male pulp fiction writers—while also extending the time frame into the late 1970s and 1980s. This makes Street Archives and City Life a valuable contribution to the historiography of this well-studied city and its inhabitants.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
