Hortense Spillers’s exploration of “the interstice” as a gap or absence within iconographic and discursive practices illuminates an aesthetics of the interstice that binds together the performance artist Lorraine O’Grady’s formal and conceptual orientation towards otherwise divergent practices of institutional critique, photographic installation, and public performance. Within the context of O’Grady’s artwork, the interstice is reconfigured as a generative site of possibility where a radical aesthetics of black social reproduction is constantly taking shape.

In this wide-ranging interview with the Marxist feminist activist and theorist Silvia Federici, Arlen Austin asks Federici about the genesis of her book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004), what it means to acknowledge and feel the trace of the past in the present, and the importance of aesthetic forms such as music and theatre to feminist social movements.