Thurs 11/20 @ 6:00PM
Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street

Black death and Black grief are among the most important forces in contemporary American politics. As Shatema Threadcraft argues in The Labors of Resurrection, “spectacular” death, experienced publicly and violently, has given rise to global political movements, but it has also had an important gendered effect that has complicated Black women’s relationship to the “Black people.”

Black women face a crisis of premature death: they are 10% of the U.S. female population, yet they are 59% of women murdered. Their deaths are most often instances of intimate partner violence and occur in private, while most large-scale Black political mobilization centers around deaths that are spectacular. Threadcraft highlights how the centrality of spectacular death has functioned to marginalize Black women in the stories of Black peoplehood.  Though Black women’s deaths are often hidden from view and marginalized in Black politics, Black female activists have helped Black communities truly “see” death, and they have worked to resurrect and keep the dead within Black political communities.

Profiling the resurrective political work of Ida B. Wells, Mamie Till-Bradley, Clementine Barfield, Barbara Smith, and Margaret Prescod, Threadcraft builds on her award-winning scholarship about Black women’s access to intimate life and democratic freedom to consider how Black activists navigate the politics of Black suffering. In so doing, she looks at the challenge that contemporary feminist activists face in attempting to make violence against Black women visible and to ameliorate Black female suffering.

Shatema Threadcraft is an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Intimate Justice: the Black Female Body and the Body Politic. She co-convenes the Black Politics/Theory/History Workshop with Juliet Hooker, Minkah Makalani and Deva Woodly. Her current research is at the intersection of reparative sexual and reproductive justice and feminist spatial justice. Her work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, The Du Bois Review, Signs, Politics & Gender, Race and Social Problems, Philosophical Topics, Theoretical Criminology and The Washington Post.

Wendy Brown is UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.  Her most recent books are In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West and Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber. She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Reparative Democracy. She also brings her thinking to public venues, among them Dissent, The Nation, Open Democracy, The Washington Post, New York Times, NPR, and Boston Review.

This event is co-sponsored by Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies and Labyrinth Books.