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

Nov 22, 2025

In this engaging discussion, Shatema Threadcraft, an Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University and author of *The Labors of Resurrection*, delves into the intersection of Black femicide and Morrisonian democracy. She highlights the haunting of Western democracies by racialized death and its impact on Black women, who face alarming rates of violence. Threadcraft explores active versus passive femicide, the dangers of pregnancy for Black women, and the failures of policing. She also advocates for grassroots organizing and counter-data movements to amplify marginalized voices and reshape democratic practices.

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INSIGHT

Defining Black Femicide

Black femicide includes murders of Black women due to gender and race, plus structural causes like housing insecurity and medical neglect.
Threadcraft argues this requires new democratic forms beyond Du Bois's abolition democracy.

INSIGHT

Active Vs Passive Femicide

Active femicide is intentional killing; passive femicide is deaths from neglect like maternal mortality and unsafe abortions.
Threadcraft highlights pregnancy as one of the most dangerous 'jobs' for Black women in the U.S.

INSIGHT

Police Can Exacerbate Harm

Policing often escalates rather than reduces violence against Black women and criminalization can harm survivors.
Abolition feminists advocate community accountability and survivor-centered supports instead of arrests.

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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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