Aug 22, 2026
In this wide-ranging conversation, Takiyah (T.D.) Harper-Shipman
joins us to discuss her new book Unruly Fertility: Race, Development, and
Decolonial Reproductive Politics (Stanford University Press,
2026). The discussion traces how modern states—from North Carolina
to Senegal—have historically sutured Black women's fertility to the
shifting demands of capitalist accumulation, deploying reproductive
health policies not as benevolent care but as instruments of crisis
management and labor control.
Harper-Shipman unpacks the colonial origins of "womanhood" itself
as a racialized labor category constructed during European
enclosures, one that has always excluded Black women from its
aspirational promises of citizenship, consumption, and reproductive
autonomy. Drawing on Federici, Mies, Spillers, and Angela Davis,
she argues that Black women enter the modern political economy as
producers of workers—never citizens—and that contemporary feminist
movements risk replicating white womanhood's assumptions when they
abandon class analysis or ignore the chains of production behind
their demands.
The conversation also examines the recent closure of USAID, an
institution Takiyah describes as fundamentally about the
preservation of white life and the extension of U.S. empire. Rather
than mourn its end, she urges us to seize this rupture and continue
dismantling the colonial infrastructure of reproductive governance
it represented. The conversation closes with a powerful critique of
the epistemic violence embedded in global family planning
campaigns—how metrics like "unmet need" were designed to serve
supplier interests, not Black women's desires, and how Black
women's embodied knowledge about contraceptive side effects is
systematically dismissed as myth while dangerous technologies
banned in the Global North are actively promoted across Africa.
Throughout, we explore the Americanization of Black political
identity from World War II through 9/11 to Obama's presidency,
tracing how Black people have been conscripted into U.S. imperial
projects through strategic moments of violence and national
belonging. This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation; additional
questions will be addressed in an August follow-up.
T.D. Harper-Shipman is an Associate Professor and Chair of Africana
Studies at Davidson College in North Carolina. She teaches courses
and publishes on political economy and its intersection with race
and gender in Africa. She has published in p Antipode, Oxford
Academic, Third World Quarterly, and International Studies Review,
among other places. She is an academic editor at Third World
Quarterly and forum editor with the Miami Institute of Social
Sciences. Her first book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in
Africa was published with Routledge Press in 2019. She has also
published in public-facing forums including Africa is a Country and
the Global African Worker.
Reckoning with Empire: Defiant Scholarship with Takiyah Harper-Shipman
La femme fait la maison: The Accumulation of Surplus Value through Family Planning in Burkina Faso
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