Black power/black death: The visual culture of death and dying in black radical politics

Black Power/Black Death interrogates the intersection of corpses and corporeality as an under-theorized performative site for thinking through revolutionary politics, the black body, and fugitive qualities of radical cultural productions. Offering a counter-history to understandings of state repression and death as solely destructive in the making of 1960s and 70s black radical politics, this project analyzes how radical black political practitioners rhetorically, materially, and visually imagined death as a generative means towards political liberation in response to state performances of U.S. antiblack violence during the Black Power era. My methodological approach brings together performance theories of the body, black studies debates between Afropessimism and Black Optimism, and art historical analyses on aesthetics approaches to political resistance. Using this methodology, I analyze three Black Panther murders between 1968 and 1971 as they catalogue the generative potential of black radical death in the service of anti-capitalist and antiracist revolutionary struggle. This dissertation curates several archival findings in order to suggest that the photography, documentary film, journalistic print media, and political posters during these brief years reflect an understanding of how black radical death was not only inevitable because of the severity of state repression, but also a constructive strategy within black revolutionary praxis.