Death's Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power

"Art historian and critic Sampada Aranke's Death's Futurity considers the importance of visual representations of death and corpses to the project of Black liberation, specifically for the Black Panther Party. Aranke uses photography, documentary films, journalistic print media, and political posters to construct a visual history of 1960s and 1970s Black radicalism. These archival objects all center death in some way-sometimes graphically-and she considers how these objects put forward a way of imagining Black futurity and liberation from the position of death. The book consists of three main chapters that critically analyze the murders of three Black Panther Party members-Bobby Hutton (1968), Fred Hampton (1969), and George Jackson (1971)"--