This event takes place in person at Charis and on Crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance. Please Note: this event will not be recorded. read the in-person event guidelines at the bottom of this page to be sure you can participate in the event. 

Charis welcomes Shatema Threadcraft in conversation with Susana M. Morris for a discussion of The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy. In this book, 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.

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 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.

Shatema Threadcraft is an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy and Morrisonian Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2025) and Intimate Justice: the Black Female Body and the Body Politic (Oxford University Press, 2016). She co-convenes the Black Politics/Theory/History Workshop with Juliet Hooker, Minkah Makalani and Deva Woodly. Her research has been supported by Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. 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, and Theoretical Criminology.

Susana M. Morris is a queer daughter of Caribbean immigrants and a scholar of Black feminism and a cultural critic who has dedicated her career to studying the interior lives of Black women. She is an associate professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. A former Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University and Norman Freeling Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, she is the author of Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women's Literature and co-founder of The Crunk Feminist Collective. Her other works include the co-edited collection The Crunk Feminist Collection and the co-authored young adult handbook Feminist AF: The Guide to Crushing Girlhood. Her writing has appeared in Gawker, Long Reads, Cosmopolitan.com, and Ebony.com, and she has been featured on NPR, the BBC, and in Essence magazine. Her most recent book is Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler. Susana was honored to serve as the board chair of Charis Circle, the non-profit programming arm of Charis Books & More, for eight years.

The event is free and open to all people, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Donate on Crowdcast or via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate or in person at the event.

Charis Books is a fully wheelchair accessible space with on site van accessible parking, two ramps, and additional overflow accessible parking nearby. Additional accessibility information can be found on the Accessibility page of our website. 

In-person event guidelines:

All attendees must wear a face mask during the event.

We will begin seating people at 7:00 PM ET.

This event will be live-streamed via Crowdcast. 

As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request specific accessibility accommodations, please contact info@charisbooksandmore.com or call the store at 404-524-0304.

Please contact us at info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org.

By attending our event, whether in person or virtually, you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Unsolicited sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to Charis staff immediately or email info@chariscircle.org.

The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy -- Shatema Threadcraft in conversation with Susana M. Morris