Kesha D. Fikes

(PhD, UCLA 2000) Assistant Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College. Fikes’ research interests are vast, but her questions are about understanding the changing terms of subject relationality between colonizer and colonized, citizen and migrant, or the elite and the poor, for instance. She is interested in how subjects’ different relationships to state authority legitimize social hierarchy. Fikes’ research settings include and span Portuguese colonial Africa – Cape Verde in particular – and imperial and EU Portugal. In each of these settings and periods her general starting point and rationale for investigation is the relationship between emergent consumption norms (locally and transnationally) and changing labor relations in select settings.
email: fikes@uchicago.edu

Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Publications:

2009 Managing African Portugal: The Citizen-Migrant Distinction. Duke University Press (in press).

2008  Discipline and Diasporic Governmentality: On the Gendered Limits of Wage-Labor in Portugal.  Feminist Review Vol 90.

2007 (reprinted) Emigration and the Spatial Production of Difference from Cape Verde. In N. Naro et al., Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic. New York: Palgrave.

2006 Emigration and the Spatial Production of Difference from Cape Verde. In K. Clarke & D. Thomas, eds., Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press.

2005 The Cape Verdean Woman Worker and Portuguese Civil Society. Revista: Revista de Estudos Cabo-verdianos. Praia: Universidade de Cabo Verde. No. 3 (Nov.)

2005 Ri(gh)tes of Intimacy at Doca Pesca -- Race vs Racism at a Fish Market in Portugal. The DuBois Review 2:2 (Harvard University Press)

2002 (w/Alaina Lemon) African Presence in Former Soviet Spaces. Annual Review of Anthropology. 31:497-524.

2002 Notes on Traveling Blackness. Transforming Anthropology. 8:2

2000 Santiaguense Cape Verdan Women in Portugal: Labor Rights, Citizenship and Diasporic Transformation. PhD Dissertation. UCLA.

1998 Domesticity in Black and White: Assessing Badia Defiances to Portuguese Ideals of 'Black Womanhood.' Transforming Anthropology. 7:1.

Forthcoming Works:

n.d.  Foreign Privatization, Waning Remittances: The Predicament of 'Middle Development' Status in Cape Verde. In preparation - book manuscript

n.d. Miscegenation Interrupted.  To appear in Africa in Portuguese, Portuguese in Africa, Isabel Gould Ferreira & Pedro Pereira, Eds.

n.d. Grocery Shopping in Cape Verde: The New Logics of Poor-Elite Sociality in Cape Verde.  Under review - article length manuscript

n.d. Insurance, Domestic Labor and Employer Accountability in Cape Verde.  Under review - article length manuscript