Activist/scholar Silvia Federici speaks of women's bodies as the last frontier of capitalist development and a major ground of feminist struggle. Presented as part of the Cabdury Conference 2017, with support from BRIHC.
On Thursday 2 June, we were thrilled to welcome the iconic Marxist/ feminist/ activist / scholar Silvia Federici to Birmingham to deliver a lecture as part of the Cadbury Conference 2017, which focused on Marriage in Africa.
In this lecture, co-hosted by BRIHC, Federici speaks of women's bodies as the last frontier of capitalist development and a major ground of feminist struggle.
Speaker biography: Silvia Federici is Professor Emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University. Her best known work, ‘Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation’, Federici explores presents women's unpaid labour as a historical precondition to the rise of a capitalist economy predicated upon wage labour. Instead of seeing capitalism as a liberatory defeat of feudalism, Federici interprets the ascent of capitalism as a reactionary move to subvert the rising tide of communalism and to retain the basic social contract. Federici worked as a teacher in Nigeria for many years, and is also the co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa.
