Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power highlights visual culture as a tool of anticapitalist and antiracist revolutionary struggle, and is a key methodological guide for those interested in the idea of art history after Black studies. Analyzing the lens-based and print media authored by the Black Panther Party (BPP) that embodied a Black radical aesthetic in the years 1969–1971, Sampada Aranke makes a forceful and convincing argument about how and why “the visual life of Black Power is activated through Black radical death” (4). The book explores a historic condition that has become more acute in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, in which the surveillance of Black bodies and the viral video footage of traumatic incidents of anti-Black violence converge. Visual culture is the domain in which Black death circulates most immediately with a disturbing ordinariness, and we don’t often think of death as generative. But Death’s Futurity mines a history of visual culture in a way that counters the sorrow of that condition with radical hope, exploring how the BPP undertook preparation for a vision of an antiracist, revolutionary future in which Black radical death was a certainty. In its dissemination of that vision—represented pictorially in the pages of the Black Panther newspaper and other ephemeral avenues, rather than unique artworks—the BPP also ensured widespread access to political education through visuality (44).

Death’s Futurity explores three case studies of Black radical death at the hands of police—Lil’ Bobby Hutton (1968), Fred Hampton (1969), and George Jackson (1971)—and the aesthetic responses to those murders in photo-based print media, documentary film, and political posters, respectively. Each of these revolutionaries is the absent subject whose death is key to strategic revolutionary vision, which sees Black power shifts in this short yet intense time period, the author argues, from militant uprising to prison abolition. Aranke puts ephemeral media (“objects that were meant to die”), often excluded from art historical study, in conversation with a broader Black art-historical canon to show how the BPP understood visual culture as a revolutionary heuristic and accessible form of political education (3–4). The BPP’s minister of culture Emory Douglas directly shaped the strategic development of a Black radical aesthetic, but Aranke turns our attention to object studies that range beyond those made by Douglas (including some anonymous or collective authorship) in a wide-ranging discussion of visual culture, anticapitalistic and revolutionary ideology, political histories, and the nuances of Black studies.

Chapter one focuses on Bobby Hutton, who was gunned down by Oakland Police days before his eighteenth birthday. As the BPP’s first and then-youngest member, and the first killed by the state, his murder was both symbolic and formative. Photographic reproduction, Aranke argues, was central to the activist response around his death—ironic given the absence of photographic evidence surrounding it, yet appropriately engaged with the violence inherent in the photographic act itself, given the camera’s association with the gun and its history in colonial exploitation. Rather than an image of Hutton’s corpse, the BPP gravitated toward an anonymous photographic portrait of a living Hutton that could be discursively activated to gesture toward the violence of his death without restaging it. Aranke analyzes its appropriation and strategic composition across various graphics as accruing in revolutionary value with every repetition—whether shattered by bullets on the cover of the Berkeley Barb, published in the immediate wake of Hutton’s death, or referenced to mobilize future activist energies by the BPP in the months and years after (52).

The mobilization of the photograph to activate revolutionary life in death echoes transitively in chapter two as the anticipation of death in life. There, Aranke triangulates three references: the 1971 documentary film The Murder of Fred Hampton, initiated while Hampton (the Deputy Chairman of the BPP) was still alive; the texts by Frantz Fanon left behind at the site of his murder; and the exhibition of Hampton’s murder scene (his Chicago apartment, where Hampton was gunned down by the FBI and Chicago Police in bed). The BPP opened the crime scene for tours to prove (against the state’s official claims) that he was violently executed by police, activating what Aranke theorizes as “politized looking,” a fascinating strategy of rendering the scene of the crime as a political exhibition that “operationalized the state’s case as false while working to make meaning out of Hampton’s murder” (55). Aranke’s reading of the “political life of objects” as surrogates for Hampton’s missing presence, and the BPP’s activation of these in the context of display, engages the fraught relationship between the Black body and object that Black studies so productively explores from a range of perspectives. The author generously parses the nuances of those conversations for the reader, while also linking Jackson to a broader diasporic range of anticolonial thought—particularly the ideas of Frantz Fanon, whose books were among Hampton’s belongings, and his theories of racial objectification. In these lengthy but necessary excurses the author’s investment in knitting together how visual culture shapes and is shaped by local and global political histories leads the reader far from the case study at hand. In doing so, though, it honors the lives of BPP members as savvy political agents (rather than emotionally reactive militarized martyrs) who participated in a global movement and whose anticipation of their death as a necessary step in revolution resists their characterization as mere victims of state-sanctioned racial violence.

Chapter three revolves around the murder of George Jackson, who was killed in 1971 during an escape attempt from San Quentin Prison. It analyzes Jackson’s own writings, which endeavored to untangle Blackness from criminality, and the political posters produced in the aftermath of his murder that visualized his body, in the context of the rise of the prison industrial complex during this period. The lack of visual evidence around his murder, and those of the others in the books, necessitates a speculative methodology that Aranke, building on Saidiya Hartman’s notion of critical fabulation, terms “fugitive imaginaries” (111–12). A response to how prisons leverage visuality to exert discipline and control, fugitive imaginaries, she writes, channel Blackness as something ungovernable, as that which “relies on an encounter with Black radicality that is criminal, defiant, and utterly resistant” (112). She conducts an iconographic study of political posters featuring Jackson’s body, comparatively situated in relation to art historical examples by David Hammons, Faith Ringgold, and Jacob Lawrence. In one poster by Rafael Morante, a splayed barefoot body that stands in for Jackson grounds the horizontal field of the image beneath “power to the people George” written in four languages, blood spilling from three bullet holes and pooling to contain the pattern of the American flag. Aranke reads the contorted figure, the flag, and the bare feet as Afrotropic tethers that intertwine histories of enslavement and lynching with Black Power and prison abolition in a global context of decolonial and Third World resistance in this period.

The book’s methodological and theoretical contributions to the history of art are incredibly valuable because Black studies and theories of performance—which the author utilizes as her primary tools of thought—critically probe questions of “the human” and “the body” that art history has long taken for granted. These tools enable Aranke to ask questions that only a handful of art historians have taken on with the tools of the discipline (which rarely suffice to address them): How do we make meaning out of visual reproductions of anti-Black violence? What are the ethics of looking, as a performative act? How does one make meaning of Black radical death in the absence of its visual evidence? As Aranke argues in the chapter on Fred Hampton, a senseless murder doesn’t have to be meaningless. When testimony is censored and buried, or photographic evidence doesn’t exist, this fundamentally alters the photograph’s relationship to proof, and the power of the speculative and the fugitive emerge as key tools of meaning-making. Introducing readers to a wide array of thinkers with in-depth analyses of their ideas, and weaving those theorists into discussions of Black art histories, Aranke explores the questions at hand with the ethical complexity that they merit, while establishing a “counter-history” to the assumption that state repression was a solely destructive force on sixties and seventies Black radical politics (2). Because, as she writes, “the visual consumption of Black pain structures and shadows all images of Black life,” we can understand Black death—as studied through the histories of enslavement and lynching, and conveyed through the aesthetic strategies of Black radical artists working in lens-based and print media—as a generative force for imagining revolutionary futures (6). Rather than simply mourn the deaths of Black revolutionary leaders as a tragic ending at the hands of state power, the book shows us how we can discern the generative legacy of those deaths as fueling a revolutionary future.