Laboring in the Shadow of Empire

CELESTE VAUGHAN CURINGTON is an assistant professor of sociology at Boston University. She is the coauthor of The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance.

“Curington’s powerful and insightful analysis of Cabo Verdean women’s experiences in the global care migration in Portugal exposes the legacy of colonialism embedded in both structural conditions and daily interactions in a society that refuses to recognize or remedy its past, only to reproduce social domination and exploitation. Relegated to society’s 'dirty work' and racialized as Black across space, time, and national context, these women create spaces of belonging while laboring in the shadow of empire.”- Mary Romero, (author of The Maid's Daughter: Living Inside and Outside the American Dream) Curington provides a much-needed intersectional analysis of Black Europe through this beautifully written ethnography of Cape Verdean women living and working in Portugal. Laboring in the Shadow of Empire refocuses our understanding of Portugal as a country of empire, colonialism, and immigration - Jean Beaman, (author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France) “Beneath and beyond the rigorous attention to the meaningful details of race and gender identity, language, and urban space, this ethnography has heart. Celeste Vaughan Curington shows us the experiences of Cape Verdean women, who rarely appear in sociological research, laboring and resisting racism in Lisbon. Laboring in the Shadow of Empire is a must-read for scholars of labor, colonialism, or domestic employment.”- Erynn Masi de Casanova, (author of Dust and Dignity: Domestic Employment in Contemporary Ecuador) “By challenging the ideological harm of Portuguese anti-racialism, Celeste Curington places the language of gendered antiblackness, white supremacy, empire, and resistance firmly at the center of our contemporary understanding of race, space, and care work in Portugal. This is a much-needed book for all those who deny the existence of racism across Portugal and Europe.”- Michelle Christian, (associate professor of sociology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville)