Deathlife

“Not since Orlando Patterson’s magisterial exploration of social death have we had as monumental an engagement with the idea of life, death, and Blackness as Anthony Pinn delivers in his groundbreaking book Deathlife. Pinn uses hip hop’s struggles between life and death, and with life as death, to illumine both the white quest for immortality through slaying Blackness, and the Black hunger for meaning by staring nothingness in the eyes. Deathlife captures the way that Blackness and being, and Blackness and nonbeing, have had no useful distinction in the lexicon of white supremacy, while brilliantly arguing for a rationale of Black existence that sees no value in separating life from death. A transcendent work of astonishing originality.”