The Witch Studies Reader is a progressive new collection of writing about witchcraft from a diverse group of academics, practitioners and scholar-practitioners who examine witchcraft from a critical and decolonial feminist perspective. It is a view that decenters Europe and departs from exoticising and pathologising writing on witchcraft in the global South.
Stories about witches are by their nature stories about the most basic and profound of human experiences – healing, sex, violence, tragedies, aging, death and encountering the mystery and magic of the unknown, so it is hardly surprising that witches should loom large in our cultural imaginations. In academia, studies of witches rarely emerge from scholars who are themselves witches and/or embedded in communities of witchcraft practitioners.
The authors in this reader show how witches are keepers of suppressed knowledges, builders of new futures, exemplars of praxis and theorists in their own right. Throughout, they account for the vastly different national, political-economic and cultural contexts in which 'the witch' is currently being claimed and repudiated.
Offering a pathbreaking transnational feminist examination of witches and witchcraft that upends white supremacist, colonial, patriarchal knowledge regimes, The Witch Studies Reader brings into being the interdisciplinary field of feminist witch studies.
Duke University Press, 520pp, 15cm x 23cm, illustrated paperback, 2024
