Death′s Futurity

“Presenting a significant intercession in the field of visual culture as well as the imaging of 1960s and 1970s radicalism and the Black Panther Party, Sampada Aranke has written a stunning book that could not be more timely.” - Kellie Jones, author of South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s

“Sampada Aranke’s writing represents what is most exciting about contemporary cultural inquiry situated at the intersection of Black studies and art-critical praxis. In this provocative and bracing book she enriches our political and philosophical understanding of the Panthers’ ambitions and takes up the challenge laid down by Black radical thinkers to consider forms of death as revolutionary acts, all while reframing our assumptions about the work of writers who have become foundational to the project of critical theory in the United States. This rich and highly compelling contribution to Black studies will be of immense interest to students and scholars across the humanities.” - Huey Copeland, author of Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America

"The author’s close readings of the role of visual artifacts in generating consciousness, agency, and a sense of futurity about a better future in their audiences is both compelling and original, and her engaging prose makes it a pleasure to read." - Simon Stow, European Journal of American Studies

"Aranke provides a lyrical and materially nuanced account of how the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense mobilized a range of visual media, objects, and tactics. . . . In the process, Aranke not only reorients our understanding of 'the political' in art of the 1960s, but also puts tremendous pressure on art-historical conceits such as 'the curatorial,' which in the Panthers’ hands does not mean protecting priceless artworks within neoliberal institutions, but rather involves preserving the bloodstained objects left in [Fred] Hampton’s apartment in order to make visible the anti-Black violence that enables the coherence of American 'civil society" and the ongoing expansion of the carceral state undergirding it." - Artforum

"Aranke demonstrates a keen awareness of the politics of looking, production, and consumption of images of Black death. . . . Death’s Futurity provides a model for describing images that feels implicitly in service to a larger project producing scholarship around traumatic scenarios without being unnecessarily graphic." - Les Gray, Theatre Journal