Shatema Threadcraft, "Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Nov 22, 2025

Shatema Threadcraft, an Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University and author, dives into the haunting realities of Black femicide and its implications on democracy. She discusses how Black women’s premature deaths often go unnoticed in political mobilization, emphasizing the need for a focus on intimate partner violence. Threadcraft explores activism strategies like missing persons initiatives and data advocacy, highlights the historical and political significance of figures like Emmett Till, and argues for a Morrisonian approach to transforming narratives around violence and justice.

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INSIGHT

Definition And Scope Of Black Femicide

Black femicide includes both murders and deaths from structural neglect like maternal mortality.
Threadcraft argues these deaths are politically marginalized because they occur privately and intersect with racism, classism, and other oppressions.

INSIGHT

Active Versus Passive Femicide

Active femicide is intentional killing and passive femicide covers deaths from neglect or inadequate care.
Threadcraft names Black maternal mortality a textbook case of passive femicide driving racial disparities.

INSIGHT

Policing's Indirect Role In Premature Death

Police are often implicated not as direct killers but by failing to protect Black women and criminalizing their self-defense.
Abolition feminists argue criminalization escalates harm and restrains survivors' protective actions.

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Western democracies are haunted. Michael Hanchard suggests that the specter of race is what haunts our democracies, but it may be more accurate to suggest that they are haunted by their own racialized death machines—by racialized premature death. If this haunting is not adequately attended to, democracies cannot fulfill their function. Even W. E. B. Du Bois, whose lynching-as-crucifixion stories are important among the stories of Black peoplehood and represent an important attempt to reckon with death in democracy, did not attend to the haunting. But many innovative Black female democrats did. Black women face a crisis of premature death. They are 10 percent of the US female population yet represent 59 percent of women murdered. Their deaths are most often instances of intimate partner violence and occur in private, whereas most large-scale Black political mobilization centers on deaths that are “spectacular.” 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. But the dearth of mobilization around the deaths of women has not stopped Black women from attending to that which haunts our democracy. Moreover, it is not simply Du Bois’s abolition democracy toward which the women have worked. Their work has involved experimentation with novel democratic forms, and we should think about that work—their methods and the substance of their contributions—within the framework of “Morrisonian truant democracy,” which provides the solution to the problem of mobilization. Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy (Oxford UP, 2025)

Professor Shatema Threadcraft is the Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University.

Find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Shatema continued their conversation.

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