Tag: Shakeelah Ismail

BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE is a collection  of anarchic essays written by a new generation of everyday thinkers, activists and scholars who are figuring out their relationship to feminism. It is a radical appraisal of the home and a call to critically rethink the mechanisms that govern the ‘private’. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the home as decolonial space.

CONTRIBUTORS: Ijeoma Chidi Opara • Shakeelah Ismail • Mbali Mazibuko • Chan Croeser • Aneeqa Abrahams • Simphiwe Rens • Cassidy Robinson • Imologang M. Morulane • Nada Faleni • Waratwa Zanokuhle Miya • Ché Adams • Chelsea Holland • Charisse Louw • Kiasha Naidoo • Ernst van der Wal • Joy Watson

PRAISE for Burning Down the House:

The house in South Africa is an intimate, bordered thing, abrupt with nearness. At home in this taunting, compulsive setting, the chapters in Burning Down the House inhabit the everyday in undaunted and visionary ways. In my own agony of unrootedness in which feminism has been an anchor, I found their writing at once unmooring and consoling. This is a book I am turning into an architecture and a map. — GABEBA BADEROON, author of The History of Intimacy

This intergenerational conversation about the home as a political and contradictory space presents us with opportunity to ask critical questions and to think of what it means to become better humans in the world. — DINA LIGAGA, author of Women, Visibility and Morality in Kenyan Popular Media

In refusing the ideology and contradiction of home offered to us, they offer a feminist reimagining of home that we must fight and love for, just that vision of a home that we may eventually embody for a new generation. — PROF PEACE KIGUWA, Psychology,
University of the Witwatersrand

Stirringly intimate, it is a powerful reminder that our feminist architectural imagination is one of our most urgent and precious tools to seize upon in our ongoing question for liberation and equality. — DAPHNE A. BROOKS, author of Liner Notes for the Revolution:
The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound

In ‘Bringing Feminist Theory Home’, the introduction to Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed urges us to think, feel, work and live differently – at the same time that we ‘burn down’ the doctrine and relationships that oppress us. This book, drawing together a range of essays that expose heteropatriarchal, colonial and classist assumptions about home, responds powerfully to Ahmed’s call. — DESIREE LEWIS, Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape

Publication date: September 2025

ISBN: 978-1-0370-9371-5