On the occasion of Ayana V. Jackson’s exhibition I Would Follow Her by Ground and Sea at Mariane Ibrahim Paris, the artist was joined by Professor Shatema Threadcraft for a conversation. Their discussion drew on Threadcraft’s books The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy and Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic.
In Intimate Justice, Professor Threadcraft interrogates how the Black female body has been shaped within political discourse, revealing justice as something profoundly intimate and lived — not abstract, but inscribed onto the body itself. In The Labors of Resurrection, she draws on Toni Morrison to explore “resurrection” as a political act: the recovery of suppressed histories in order to imagine new democratic possibilities.
Within the exhibition, Jackson similarly engages acts of return and re-staging. Through performative self-portraiture, she inhabits historical narratives, exposing the violences embedded within archives while simultaneously reclaiming agency. The conversation illuminated how both artist and theorist approach the body as a site of inscription, resistance, and reimagining.
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). The Labors of Resurrection examines the phenomenon of Black femicide and chronicles the resurrective political labor of Ida B. Wells, Mamie Till Bradley, Clementine Barfield, Barbara Smith, Margaret Prescod and Toni Morrison in the service of Black, sexual and reproductive freedom. Intimate Justice won 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 co-convenes the Black Politics/Theory/History Workshop with Juliet Hooker, Minkah Makalani and Deva Woodly. 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 writing 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, Theoretical Criminology and The Washington Post.
Professor Shatema Threadcraft's books remain available at Librairie Marian Ibrahim.
