The Labors of Resurrection

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." Though Black women face a crisis of premature death, their deaths are most often instances of intimate partner violence and occur in private when 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. Premature death haunts all Black life and therefore the dead are a constant presence in Black politics. Ironically, 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 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 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.