Mon 2/23 @ 6:00PM
The Princeton Public Library

The author, joined in conversation by Reena Goldthree, presents her new book The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy.

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.

Reena Goldthree is associate professor of African American studies at Princeton University and is also associated faculty in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and the Program in Latin American Studies. She is the author of Democracy’s Foot Soldiers: World War I and the Politics of Empire in the Greater Caribbean. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, The American Historian, and Radical Teacher. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the American Historical Association, Coordinating Council for Women in History, Ford Foundation, Institute for Citizens & Scholars, Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Fulbright.

Presented in partnership with Labyrinth Books and the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University and with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.