Events

A lecture by Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh (Stanford University).

Enslaved people in the United States used materials and evinced cosmological ideas that challenged, expanded, and transcended Western European epistemological understandings of “religion,” even as said practices were presented as foils to the category. As a category deployed by researchers and a range of practices wielded by enslaved practitioners in the U.S. South, conjure names a collection of practices rendered opaque both in terms of its scholarly imprecision and its deliberate obfuscation of bondpeople’s complex inner lives by its practitioners. Often presented as base, violent, and problematically sensual due to its ties to foreign “magic,” outsiders’ renderings of conjure served as justification for American enslavement and masked the violence of slaveholding religiosity, while reifying the one-dimensionality of “slaves” in American discourses. At the same time, this historical racist stereotyping and vilification of bondpeople’s religions has often yielded a historiographical reluctance to theorize the ways religion and violence intersected in the religious productions and understandings of the enslaved. The result is often an equally one-dimensional rendering of enslaved communities. Reflecting upon the “dangerous magic” of categories like conjure in the study of religion and slavery, the presentation examines what violent practices reveal about intimate and communal conflict in the lives of southern enslaved people and the limitations of methodological categories when impeded by centuries of epistemic and historical violence. Through an examination of the case of Josephine, an enslaved woman accused of poisoning her slaveholders and killing their infant child, I explore the ways bondwomen weaponized ritual knowledge and racialized fears of Black women’s ties to harming protocols to respond to gendered forms of violence in the slavery era.

A lecture by Malcolm Gaskill (University of East Anglia, UK), moderated by Julie Stone Peters (Columbia, English).

In the late 1640s and early 50s strange things began to happen in the Massachusetts township of Springfield. As tensions rose, rumours of witchcraft spread, and the community became tangled in a web of anxiety and suspicion, fear and recrimination. This lecture tells the story of Hugh and Mary Parsons, a troubled married couple at the eye of the storm, and explores the uncertain relationship between the theory and practice of witch-beliefs, as they appeared in one particular historical case-study.

A lecture by Starhawk (witch, peace activist, and ecofeminist).

For over forty years, Starhawk has been a key figure in movements cultivating engaged approaches to magic and ecofeminism. While her work is situated outside the mainstream of academic discourse, it often speaks directly to the conceptual framings of secular modernity and public life. In this talk, Starhawk brings her work and experience to bear on a crucial topic in these times: the difference between magic and “magical thinking”—the rampant denial, conspiracy theories, and general irrationality swamping society today.

A panel with Elizabeth Perez (UC Santa Barbara), Graham Jones (MIT), and Yvonne Chireau (Swarthmore).

In what ways did colonial powers deploy the language of magic as a tool of domination? To what extent are magic and modernity mutually constitutive? How have stereotypes of superstition and the occult continued to mark (post)colonial subjects and minority communities? And, perhaps, what is to be done with respect to a rearticulation and reassertion of what gets cast as magic; can magic be decolonized?

A lecture by Silvia Federici (Hofstra University), moderated by Jack Halberstam (ISSG)

One of the most worrisome phenomena of our time is the return, in various countries, of true witch-hunts, a persecution that, like in the past, affects particularly women. As the same time, we are witnessing a new interest in witches among feminists worldwide, as the figure of the witch is taken as the symbol of anti-patriarchal rebellion. In her presentation, Silvia Federici will discuss the significance of these different developments, and the strategies that feminist and other social movements are organizing to end the persecution of “witches.”