Description: The Witch Studies Reader brings together a diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners who examine witchcraft from a critical decolonial feminist perspective that decenters Europe and departs from exoticizing and pathologizing studies of witchcraft.
Review Quotes: "In this impressive compendium, materialists and spiritualists, cyborgs and goddesses alike will find much to chew on. Witches of all genders, unite!"--Sophie Lewis author of, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation
"The Witch Studies Reader is a must-have for scholars and practitioners of witchcraft, esotericism, and the metaphysical. The contributors go beyond the tropes of witches as rebels and recluses to examine the distinctive ways of knowing and being that manifest in their practices. Comprehensive in its scope and unapologetic in its feminist orientation, this volume is nothing less than an academic grimoire, conjuring vital new horizons for the transformative historical and ethnographic study of witchy things."--Elizabeth Pérez, author of, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions "I'm thrilled to see witch studies getting its due, and I can't wait to read this long-overdue anthology of contributions by transnational witch-scholars sharing their feminism, diversity, wisdom, anti-colonialism and interdisciplinarity."--Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine "A beautifully-produced 500-page grimoire of over 30 essays by writers from around the world, with a fore fronting of witches of colour and voices from the Global South. . . . I'm gobsmacked by the breadth, research quality and radicalism of this anthology. . . . Whilst incorporating fascinating insights and research on the kind of witchcraft 'glamour' and political activism we see breaking into the mainstream media in Western culture, The Witch Studies Reader highlights how tens of thousands of poor, Indigenous and/or ageing women in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have been murdered for their association, real or imagined, with witchcraft in the past eighty years."--Adrienne Murphy, Irish Times "Powerful, provocative, and paradigm-shifting, The Witch Studies Reader is a remarkable work of interdisciplinary scholarship. . . . Within The Witch Studies Reader, the clash between old and new is powerfully present in every chapter, but instead of sparking something destructive, the results are profoundly generative."--Kristen J. Sollée, Gender & Society "The Witch Studies Reader is a ground-breaking book. . . . Soma Chaudhuri, Jane Ward, and Duke University Press are to be congratulated in producing a high quality, aesthetically pleasing volume that is accessible for scholars and students, as well as for witchcraft practitioners who wish to deepen their understanding of their practice in its social, political, and cultural contexts."--Vivianne Crowley, Journal of the American Academy of Religion "The Witch Studies Reader is a formidable and intellectually generative volume and an indispensable resource for scholars committed to rethinking the witch not as symbol or spectacle, but as a transhistorical site of contestation, grief, and radical possibility."--Moussa Pourya Asl, Journal of International Women's Studies ". . . [I]t contributes a number of quality essays on topics underrepresented in the literature, making it valuable. Recommended. General readers through graduate students."--G. J. Reece, Choice