Unruly Fertility Race, Development, and Decolonial Reproductive Politics

"In this timely account,Takiyah Harper-Shipman provides a powerful analysis of the state's complicity in poor reproductive outcomes for Black women and boldly charts an unruly and ungovernable vision of reproductive freedom. Historically and ethnographically grounded in both Senegal and North Carolina, Harper-Shipman models practices of theorizing from below." -Adom Getachew, University of Chicago

"A compelling, smart, and persuasive exploration of the exigencies of capitalist nation-states' projects and narratives of progress centered on the management of poor Black women's fertility. Unruly Fertility is a capacious and theoretically original book that belongs on the bookshelves of everyone invested in feminist, anti-capitalist horizons of freedom centered on the lives and agency of some of the most marginalized racialized communities in the world."-Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Syracuse University

"Unruly Fertility is a well-conceived and innovative work of feminist international political economy and decolonial politics of reproduction. Even as Takiyah Harper-Shipman shows us how the ideologies of gender, fertility, and anti-Blackness conspire with the global economy to extract from Black women reproductive labor, this is not a story about defeats or reproductive dystopia. Instead, Unruly Fertility divulges the tactics and strategies of refusal Black women use to (re)claim their lives, dignity, and reproductive freedom." -H. L. T. Quan, Arizona State University

"T.D. Harper-Shipman charts a novel path in studies of social reproduction and care by theorizing concretely from the vantage point of the social and political worlds of the excluded, exploited and marginalized, who she successfully recasts as major actors in the struggle between capitalist development and liberation. Unruly Fertilityis an elegantly written and compelling account of the surreptitious reliance by states on women's fertility to resolve enduring social and economic crises."-Lyn Ossome, Makerere University