Tempestuous Maternities

For both decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter and Marxist feminist Silvia Federici, Shakespeare’s The Tempest unlocks central elements of our racial capitalist history and present. At first glance incompatible, their respective readings are mutually generative. Wynter’s prioritization of racial/colonial categories over ostensibly universal “gender” corrects Federici’s conflation of European women’s oppression with that of African and American Indigenous peoples. At the same time, Federici’s emphases on sexual violence, reproduction, and witch hunts supplements Wynter’s focus on rationalization and secularization. Read together, their work reveals both pitfalls and potential alignments across disparate histories of dispossession that span Shakespeare’s world and our own

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