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The author, joined in conversation by Reena Goldthree, presents her new book, "The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy."
About the book (from the publisher):
Black grief and Black death 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." Though Black women face a crisis of premature death, they are unlikely to experience violence in public ways. Their deaths are most often instances of intimate partner violence and occur in private when most large-scale Black political mobilization centers on deaths that are spectacular.
Profiling Ida B. Wells, Mamie Till-Bradley, Clementine Barfield, Barbara Smith, and Margaret Prescod, Threadcraft highlights how the centrality of spectacular death has functioned to marginalize Black women in the stories of Black peoplehood and has ensured that they are not the main beneficiaries of large-scale Black political mobilization. Black women receive ample, if largely symbolic, recognition for keeping Black communities alive, but they have not received the recognition they are due for their role in memorializing the Black dead. Threadcraft builds on her award-winning scholarship about Black women's access to intimate life and democratic freedom, to consider how state officials, Black activists, and others assign meaning to the racial politics of Black suffering. In so doing, she looks at the challenge that contemporary feminist activists face in attempting to make visible Black women within the Black political sphere.
In conversation:
Shatema Threadcraft is associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at Vanderbilt University and the author of "Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic" (Oxford, 2016). Her article "Intimate Justice, Political Obligation and the Dark Ghetto" (Signs, 2014) was awarded the 2015 Okin-Young Award, which recognizes the best paper on feminist political theory. Her research has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Harvard's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the University Center for Human Values, the Ford Foundation, and the American Association of University Women.
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" (Princeton University Press, 2025). Drawing on archival sources from the Caribbean, England, and United States, the book reveals how the crisis of World War I transformed Afro-Caribbeans’ understanding of, and engagements with, the British Empire. Her work has also 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.
AGE GROUP: | Adults |
EVENT TYPE: | Humanities | Civic Life | Author Talks | *Registration Requested |
TAGS: | Revolution | NEH |
