Caliban and the Witch – Witch Hunts in the Present Day

Lecture by Silvia Federici

Like at the dawn of capitalist development, today as well the global expansion of capitalist relations is driven by a broad attack on our reproduction and the escalation of violence against women including new forms of witch-hunting. In her presentation Federici examines the factors motivating these new persecutions, while revisiting the main themes of Caliban and the Witch, stressing in particular the relation between witch-hunting, capitalist development and the capitalist restructuring of gender relations.

Respondent: Suzana Milevska

Silvia Federici (born 1942, Parma, Italy) is a scholar, teacher, and activist from the radical feminist Marxist tradition. She is a professor emerita at Hofstra University, where she was a social science professor. She worked as a teacher in Nigeria, is the co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, and is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. She is the author of Caliban and the Witch: Women and Revolution at Point Zero.

The Public Lecture is part of COMMONING THE CITY, the WWTF International Summer School that takes place from the 22nd – 29th of June 2014. The Summer School is organized by “Spaces of Commoning”, an interdisciplinary research collective working on artistic practices, the making of urban commons and visions of change based at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and funded by the WWTF (Vienna Science and Technology Fund).

This lecture is organized in collaboration with the IKW (Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies)