Silvia federici goodreads

“The witch appears as a legendary and imaginary character. She isn’t. There were women who were, in fact, arrested, persecuted and killed. We have to fight to guarantee that we aren’t burned again.”

All over the world, violence against women is on the increase, frequently taking the form of a new “witch hunt”. Silvia Federici examines the meaning of this return, relating it to the witch hunts that took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – in Europe and the “new world” – and to the new forms of capitalist accumulation, while looking closely at the meaning of the figure of the witch in feminist theory and culture.

Silvia Federici is an activist, feminist, writer and teacher of Political Philosophy and International Studies at Hofstra University in New York. This lecture accompanies the launch of the Portuguese version of her most recent and highly acclaimed book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and the Original Accumulation, published by Orfeu Negro.

Silvia Federici (1942, Parma, Italy) is a feminist writer, teacher, and militant.

In 1972, Federici was co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, which launched the Wages for Housework campaign internationally. With other members of Wages for Housework, like Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, and with feminist authors like Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Federici has been instrumental in developing the concept of "reproduction" as a key to class relations of exploitation and domination in local and global contexts, and as central to forms of autonomy and the commons.

In the 1990s, after a period of teaching and research in Nigeria, she was active in the anti-globalization movement and the U.S. anti-death penalty movement. She is one of the co-founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, an organization dedicated to generating support for the struggles of students and teachers in Africa against the structural adjustment of African economies and education systems. From 1987 to 2005, she also taught international studies, women’s studi

•