Death's Futurity: The Visual Life Of Black Power by Sampada Aranke (review)

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• Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life Of Black Power by Sampada Aranke
• Les Gray

DEATH’S FUTURITY: THE VISUAL LIFE OF BLACK POWER. By Sampada Aranke. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023; pp. 186

Sampada Aranke’s Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power closely reads a group of cultural objects and ephemera circulating around the lives and murders of three notable Black Panther Party (BPP) for Self-Defense members: Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, and George Jackson. Aranke attends to undertheorized and under-historicized art objects while drawing supplemental support from Fanon to Foucault. These theorists help her develop her argument and were interlocuters for the three BPP members upon whom she focuses. Conversant in Black cultural studies, performance studies, and general critical theory, Aranke uses material culture and art to prove how visual life of Black power is activated through Black radical death“(4). The book begins from the premise that in the United States (and globally), Black death, Black liberation, and Black art are not only intimately linked and referential, but also constitutive of each other. Aranke details how state terror and the disciplining of Black bodies provoked the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense to utilize Black radical aesthetics in response to the banal yet generative spectacle of Black revolutionary death. While her text concerns itself with objects, it is also attuned to the technologies that allowed for iterative reproduction and distribution of images to “mobilize a revolutionary future” (23). Aranke’s study unites bodies and objects as they move socially, spatially, and temporally in order to construct a multivalent consideration of the archive and its limited capacity to preserve Black life.

Aranke’s object lessons related to Hutton, Hampton, and Jackson range from images printed in BPP newspapers to the books authored or read by the revolutionaries. She centers Black embodiment, “politicized looking,” and the production of fugitive imaginaries which were intentionally deployed by Black cultural producers to mobilize masses. For Aranke, this kind of gaze destabilizes and clarifies one’s relationship to the murder of Black radical subjects as it demands viewers “slow down the process of image consumption in order to see the conditions through which life, and in this case death, occurs at an uneven, disjunctive, and violent level against Black people” (87). Aranke enacts readings of fugitive imaginaries within a frame of ongoing domestic warfare in relationship to the bodies and objects discussed in her book.

Death’s Futurity details an interconnected network of Black radicals and lays the foundation for a conclusion that extends into today as Aranke links early impulses calling for Black Power to the prioritization of prison abolition. The book begins by establishing the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the socio-political context in which they emerged, their goals and actions, and the often-violent responses they faced. From this grounding context, Aranke offers a series of interrelated constellations of material culture and art that orbit the murder of the three influential figures from 1968 to 1971. “Chapter Two: 1,000 Bobby Huttons” establishes the transtemporal photos surrounding Black death as sites of futurity and fugitivity. These objects call an unknown future of liberation into being as they are produced and reproduced in times of Black precarity. In particular, Aranke collapses the distance between camera and gun—i.e. their overlapping prerogatives to shoot and capture—arguing that both are effective weapons for a revolution. In Aranke’s reading of the weaponized camera, the bullet hole morphs into an aperture for “politicized looking.” This is followed by a chapter on the murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago and subsequent documentarian efforts to visualize Hutton’s radical life and radical death by pointing still and moving cameras towards the extant remains of his material life. Film and photos capture the home turned into a museum, the books that surrounded his bloodied bed, and briefly the mother of his child, further extending the “politized looking” eye to view yet another (film) shooting in response to the shooting of a gun. Aranke argues such images draw into sharper focus the surrogates and stand-ins for Hutton’s body and life, including his reading projects alongside his...