The Demonic Maternal in Sylvia Wynter and Silvia Federici

• In Event: The Mother

Abstract

Sycorax, the Algerian witch and mother of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is a pivotal figure for two key theorists of the transition to racial capitalist modernity, decolonial literary theorist and philosopher Sylvia Wynter and Marxist feminist Silvia Federici. The “blue-eyed
hag” is long dead before the play opens, but—as postcolonial and feminist readers have noted—she and her powers, “so strong that could control the moon,” thoroughly haunt the text. Both thinkers figure her meanings as crucial in a time of planetary crisis, but their respective terms diverge. For Wynter, Sycorax is the colonized Afro-Caribbean counterpart to Prospero’s daughter Miranda, epitome of virtuous European womanhood—dramatizing Wynter’s claim that prevailing configurations of power are a matter of genrerather than gender. Sycorax’s absent presence marks what Wynter calls “demonic grounds,” sites whose constitutive exile from racial capitalist rationality might enable new and liberatory praxes of humanity. While Federici notes Sycorax’s origins, for her the witch nevertheless stands for quasi-universal feminine practices incompatible with the emerging capitalist regime’s “patriarchy of the wage,” and hence demonized and prosecuted under the witch hunts of Shakespeare’s time: agricultural
commoning, herbalism, non-reproductive sexuality, abortion, and midwifery. Federici’s broader oeuvre figures such practices as key to transformations toward collective flourishing. I read these two accounts with and against one another. Wynter’s insistence on the priority of racial/colonial categories over an ostensibly universal gender binary offers an important corrective to Federici’s tendency to assimilate European women’s oppression to that of African and American Indigenous peoples. At the same time, Federici’s focus on social and biological reproduction and on state witch hunting supplements Wynter’s emphasis of intellectually-driven processes of rationalization and secularization.

Author

• Annie Menzel, University of Wisconsin