The Witch Studies ReaderThe Witch Studies Reader

"The past decade has seen a resurgence of the esoteric and the occult into the Western mainstream, often as a queer feminist way to claim the power of the irrational and the "natural" world, and as a way of integrating critiques of colonial rationality into everyday practices. At the same time, poor, indigenous, and/or aging women across the global South are persecuted and even murdered for their real and imagined associations with practices that also fall under the umbrella of witchcraft. The Witch Studies Reader attempts to hold both of these truths together, offering a transnational feminist perspective on the power and the persecution of the witch, taking into account the vastly different national, political, economic, and cultural contexts in which she is being claimed and repudiated. Essay topics range from matrilinear knowledge sharing in Appalachia and witchy women in 1960s rock counter-culture to witch killings in Tanzania and the "decolonial love" of Romani witchcraft practices closed to outsiders. This pathbreaking and field-defining transnational feminist examination of witches and witchcraft is the first collection to examine witchcraft from a critical feminist perspective that decenters Europe and departs from anthropological and exoticizing or pathologizing writing on witchcraft in the global south"--