Introduction

’Black Futurity in a Photographic Frame’ stages an encounter with a collection of images that articulate the historical and contemporary grammar of black futurity resulting from the criminalization and mass incarceration of black bodies in the US. It engages a remarkable set of Tumblr photos and their reappropriation by African American youth struggling to develop a practice of refusing the statistical probability of premature death in the twenty-first century. Tina Campt is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Africana and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Chair of the Africana Studies Department at Barnard College and affiliated with Columbia University (IRWGS). Having taught at Duke University, UC-Santa Cruz, and the TU Berlin, she joined the Barnard faculty in NYC in 2010. She has received grants and fellowships from the American Association of University Women, DAAD, and the Social Science Research Council. She is the author of Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (2012), and the forthcoming Listening to Images.
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