Verso Books
27 October 2021
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Caliban and the Witch: A Verso Roundtable

This October, Verso is hosting a roundtable on Silvia Federici’s incantatory and incendiary Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (2004), inviting reflections from activists, writers, and scholars to discuss the provocations of Federici’s arguments on capitalism and colonialism, bodies and reproduction, race and slavery—and the powerful figure of the witch.

Carrington-self-potrait-
Leonora Carrington, Self-Portrait, (c. 1937-1938), The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, 2002, © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

All Organizing is Magic 

- Sarah Jaffe examines the echoes of witchcraft in contemporary anti-capitalist discourse and practice.

House Plants and Huacas

- So Mayer celebrates the book's wild edges - its endless elicitations of new political and intellectual opportunities.

Wrath, Line, and Substance

- Peter Linebaugh explicates the intellectual traditions which Silvia Federici drew from and transcended in her innovative study of witchcraft and the origin of capitalism.

Learning from Witchy and Wayward Women

- Alys Weinbaum shows how Federici's work illuminates capital's fundamental drive to dominate reporductive processes.

A Gathering Against History

- Ariella Aïsha Azoulay argues that the persecution of unruly, 'unproductive' women in Europe during the transition to capitalism paralleled the subjection of 'indigenous' populations under colonial rule.