Book club announcement: Silvia Federici summer!
Read "Caliban and the Witch" with Akosua and Tia
In my 2025 reading menu post, I shared my goal of finally reading Silvia Federici’s Marxist-feminist theory classic Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004). My friend Akosua (of
), with whom I recently collaborated to co-chair a seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference, reached out to say that it’s been on her shelf for ages as well, and so we decided to make a summer book club of it!
Caliban and the Witch is a response to Marxist theories of early capitalism, one that argues for the role of gender in the rise of the nuclear family, division of public/private spheres, and erosions of sexual liberty and bodily autonomy. Federici, who was one of the founders of the international Wages for Housework movement in the 70s, aims to theorize a gendered history of capitalism beyond the POV of Marx, without imagining women’s histories as distinct from those of proletariat men (in other words, she is for reading histories of gender, the family, sexuality, and class as intertwined).
Akosua has done extensive reading on capital and markets, and we both have a strong interest in the body (she works on the figure of the Black flaneur in the 20th century, while I work on gesture, posture, and pose). We’re hoping that our reading of this book together will help to illuminate what makes Federici’s text a classic in the field, as well as to think of some ‘jumping off points’ related to our own research and investments.
If you’re also interested in brushing up on some feminist and Marxist theory, we hope that you will join us in our reading. We’ll post our discussions on our respective newsletters following the schedule below and leave lots of space for questions and responses in the comments for those interested (ICYMI, I ran a book club last summer on Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are, which you can find here. Ours will be different of course, but this might give you some idea of the shapes our inquiry could take).
Make sure you subscribe to
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Part I: July 17
Preface
Introduction
“All the World Needs a Jolt”
“The Accumulation of Labor”
Part II: July 31
“The Great Caliban”
“The Great Witch Hunt”
“Colonization and Christianization”
Where to buy:
Ask your local bookstore if they can order it for you, or check the library!
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