Open to New School faculty, staff, and students only; must have an @newschool.edu email address to register.

Black women are 10% of the U.S. female population yet represent 59% of women murdered. Most of those deaths were instances of intimate partner violence, and thus, a form of Black femicide. More pregnant women are murdered than those who die of the top three pregnancy-related complications, yet Black women account for 44.6 percent of all pregnancy-related fatal intimate partner violence in the United States. As well maternal and abortion related deaths are considered a form of “passive” femicide. Today 57% Black women of reproductive age in the United States live under abortion bans and/or severe abortion restrictions and Black women are three times more likely to die of pregnancy related complications than white women.

Despite the above, more people are mobilized in response to the deaths of Black men than those of Black women. Kimberlé Crenshaw understands this asymmetry as being partially rooted in Black women’s lack of “narrative capital,” and has called on women to “share their stories” of violence in order to redistribute said capital and occasion greater mobilization. But those who call on Black women to share their stories of private violence must reflect, not only on the complications of sharing publicly these stories of violent intimacy but on how Black political leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois have written spectacular violence, and specifically lynching, into the story of who Blacks are and why they are here.

This talk considers the people-making stories of Du Bois alongside Toni Morrison’s stories, the deaths she centers in her work, the ephemeral collectives she sought to build through these stories of intimate violence and death and how she would have the stories shared to argue for an effective method of storytelling to increase mobilization in response to Black women’s deaths.

SPEAKER
Shatema Threadcraft is an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Philosophy and Political Science at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (Oxford University Press, 2016), winner of the National Women’s Studies Association’s 2017 Sara A. Whaley Award for the best book on women and labor, the 2017 W.E.B. Du Bois Distinguished Book Award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and the 2017 Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association's Race, Ethnicity and Politics Organized Section (Best Book in Race and Political Theory). She was the 2017-2018 Ralph E. and Doris M. Hansmann Member at the Institute for Advanced Study and a Visiting Research Associate in the Department of Political Studies at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg from 2009- 2012. Her research has been supported by Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, 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 new book, The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy and Morrisonian Truant Democracy, examines the phenomenon of Black Femicide as well as how Ida B. Wells, Mamie Till Bradley, Clementine Barfield, Barbara Smith, Margaret Prescod and Toni Morrison have confronted disproportionate premature Black death and made transformative democratic interventions in response to those deaths.