Overview

The book investigates the witch as a key rhetorical symbol in twentieth- and twenty-first century feminist memory, politics, activism, and popular culture. The witch demonstrates the inheritance of paradoxical pasts, traversing numerous ideological memoryscapes. This book is an examination of the ways that the witch has been deployed by feminist activists and writers in their political efforts in the twentieth century, and how this has indelibly affected cultural memories of the witch and the witch trials, and how this plays out in popular culture representations of the symbol through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Consequently, this book considers the relationship between popular culture and media, activist politics, and cultural memory. Using hauntological theories of memory and temporality, and literary, screen, and cultural studies methodologies, this book considers how popular culture remembers, misremembers, and forgets usable pasts, and the uses (and misuses) of thesememories for feminist politics. Given the ubiquity of the witch in popular culture, politics and activism since 2016, this book is a timely examination of the range of meanings inherent to the figure, and is an important study of how cultural symbols like the witch inherit paradoxical memories, histories, and politics. The book will be valuable for scholars across disciplines, including witchcraft studies, feminist philosophy and history, memory studies, and popular culture studies.

Full Product Details

9783031252914

Table of Contents

Reviews

“Feminist Afterlives of the Witch is not only an interdisciplinary exploration of the witch's figure in her own right, but also a profound meditation on the mechanics of feminist memory practices, how they are embedded and performed in popular (media) culture and on the opportunities they create for 'imagining more just futures' ... .” (Jana Christin Lammerding, rezens.tfm, rezenstfm.univie.ac.at, May 15, 2025) 

Author Information

Brydie Kosmina is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide, Australia, in Tarndanya/Adelaide. Her research covers feminist memory, politics and popular culture, and the environmental humanities, particularly nuclear studies. She teaches and lectures in literary, screen and cultural studies. Brydie is a Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Representative to the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia, and works as an editor, writer and reviewer for indie arts and culture website Collage Adelaide.

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