Overview

In Deathlife, Anthony B. Pinn analyzes hip hop to explore how Blackness serves as a framework for defining and guiding the relationship between life and death in the United States. Pinn argues that white supremacy and white privilege operate based on the right to distinguish death from life. This distinction is produced and maintained through the construction of Blackness as deathlife. Drawing on Afropessimism and Black moralism, Pinn theorizes deathlife as a technology of whiteness that projects whites' anxieties about the end of their lives onto the Black other. Examining the music of Jay Z, Kendrick Lamar, Tyler the Creator, and others, Pinn shows how hip hop configures the interconnection and dependence between death and life in such a way that death and life become indistinguishable. In this way, Pinn demonstrates that hip hop presents an alternative to deathlife that challenges the white supremacist definitions of Blackness and antiblackness more generally.

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9781478020608

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Reviews

“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.” -- Michael Eric Dyson

“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 eye. 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.” -- Michael Eric Dyson “Anthony B. Pinn shows how Black critical theory’s focus on the antagonism between the human and Blackness can be heard in hip hop and popular culture. His concept of deathlife—the merging together of death and life—underscores how the sphere of the (white) human relies on the fantasy of cordoning off life from death. Whiteness, Pinn argues, needs Black deathlife in order to understand life and death.” -- Joseph R. Winters, author of * Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress *

“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.” -- Michael Eric Dyson “Anthony B. Pinn shows how Black critical theory’s focus on the antagonism between the human and Blackness can be heard in hip hop and popular culture. His concept of deathlife—the merging together of death and life—underscores how the sphere of the (white) human relies on the fantasy of cordoning off life from death. Whiteness, Pinn argues, needs Black deathlife in order to understand life and death.” -- Joseph R. Winters, author of * Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress *

Author Information

Anthony B. Pinn is Agnes Cullen Arnold Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religion at Rice University. He is the author of numerous books, most recently, Interplay of Things: Religion, Art, and Presence Together, also published by Duke University Press.

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