Deathlife Hip Hop and Thanatological Narrations of Blackness

"Not since Orlando Patterson's magisterial exploration of social death have we had as monumental an engagement with the ideas 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)