No Futures
Open Access DepositedNo Futures is a dying and amalgamating ethnographic cultural mixtape of the visual artifacts of Black people’s confrontation with the desire to die. Niggas have been violently dismembered to fit into a world that wants to kill them… and disappear our eulogies, too. Through multidisciplinary speculative and archival storytelling by way of experimental film, book arts, textiles, and social engagement — this dying anthology unveils how complex the laments of Black suicidal people are within an antiblack world. Across time, place, and space, Black self-murder is never without the assumption of state-facilitation, and state-violence is never removed from a Black person’s failure-to-survive. Black people’s desire to die is thrown into crisis as autonomy and subjugation cannot be disentangled from each other. Do our wilted eulogies only exist to indict the soil? Do we miss the forest for the trees because strange fruit can’t hang itself? Where does this leave everyday suicidal Black people? No Futures disrupts the narratives of state-first, domination-dominant context that removes the individual experience of wanting to die and in turn, smothers our voice to express or pursue that desire. No Futures is not an encouragement of death, but rather an affirmation to consider or choose. Within this cultural moribund anthology, my work references a collage of Set It Off, Toni Morrison, Donny Hathaway, Zora Neale Hurston, Juice, Kalief Browder, and Marlon Riggs. The stories, fictional and nonfictional, of Blackness struggling with the desire to live, sustain, endure, and die are choreographic to the political reality that suicide is an im/possibility and seemingly, the last and first resort of what it means to be Black. After the art goes to sleep, somewhere in this cultural artistic excavation is myself… a Black suicidal person who hasn’t yet jumped, and desires an end without inflicting more pain on those that I love and myself. When you’re Black, there is nowhere to be suicidal and nowhere to be free – even if you can embody sanist, ableist standards of performative livability. No Futures is both decaying and emerging, and it might outlive the death of the author as poetic negrophobic justice.
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Shackelford_gwu_0075M_17946.pdf | 2026-06-24 | Open Access |
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