For too long, academics have conceptualized witchcraft and witch hunts—especially in the global south—as fetishized rituals  of exotic groups, relegating research on witches to area studies. Such marginalization is rooted in a colonial and then post-colonial white western gaze that largely dominates the research on the global south, leading to misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the different but connected political-economic contexts in which the figure of the witch is evoked. In the global north, witchcraft is treated as either an historical practice (of Medieval Europe and colonial New England) or a New Age feminist occult practice that waxes and wanes in response to political upheaval and uncertainty. As a result, academic attention to witches has consisted of a largely disconnected and exoticized compilation of writing, with little or no conversation between scholars and witchcraft practitioners themselves. What is missing is a much needed feminist, decolonial, and global approach to the subject.
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Over the last few years, U.S. news media began to notice an explosion of interest in witches and witchcraft among feminists and queers. As the media has reported, this wave of feminist witches is “intersectional AF,” with Black witches, brujas, and queer and trans witches at their helm, and hexes on patriarchy and white supremacy among the modern witch’s most popular spells. Witchcraft has also taken its place inside queer and feminist movement spaces, with feminist influencers proudly blending identities like “antiracist, abolitionist, organizer, witch.” But a startling contrast to this embrace and celebration of the witch identity in the global north, are the ritualized violent witch hunts that target and persecute women among some communities in the global south—a phenomenon mostly ignored by the western media. Here tens of thousands of poor women, indigenous women, and/or aging women across in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, have been murdered for their association—real or imagined—with witchcraft in the past fifty years. This violence is ongoing today.
With this background in mind, we are calling for chapter proposals that illuminate how feminists can make sense of the witch—her power and her persecution—in ways that take account of the vastly different national, political-economic, and cultural contexts in which she is currently being claimed and repudiated.  The Witch Studies Reader, being prepared for Duke University Press, will dive deep into this question, revealing the current era to be a time of feminist celebration of witchcraft in many parts of the global North, and a time of continued violence and death for women accused of witchcraft in many parts of the global South. This book will be the first of its kind to hold both realities in view by tracing the evolving relationship between the figure of the witch and the global political-economic and cultural context in which she is located.
We are seeking contributions from practitioners of witchcraft, academics and anti-witch hunt activists from the global north and south to provide a truly global, decolonized, anti-racist, feminist and grassroots interpretation of witch studies.
