What does a critique of antiblackness look like? Tryon P. Woods offers us an invaluable account: a deft critique of the system and its configuration of power. Woods calls for an unsettling, self-sacrificing, and critical engagement with our affective investment to the legacy of the human. Cinema, in its circulation and consumption of images of blackness, makes its impact felt in white civil society's antiblack libidinal economy, and for this reason alone it is a medium to reckon with. In the afterlife of our slaveholding culture, cinematic representations of social death must resist the pull of all forms of sentimentalism. Uplifting personal stories of antiblack violence and recognizing the excluded while leaving the system's naturalized rotten core-its antiblack structures-unchecked can only cruelly prolong the murderous status quo. Woods's incisive intervention will jolt many of us out of our sanctioned liberal anti-racist slumber, compelling us to take up the political and collective challenge to bear witness and respond to black power, to invent and recreate the world otherwise, and to infuse it with a desperately needed sense of human reciprocity.

Zahi Zalloua, Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and Professor of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies, Whitman College, USA

The Cinema of Social Death is a singular and remarkable book. With conceptual clarity and theoretical poise, Tryon Woods produces insights that help undo the decadence embedded in readings of cinematic images of blackness, past and present. In doing so, The Cinema of Social Death provides a much-needed riposte against the fantasies of present-day visual observations and the facile forms of antiracism that too often grip the philosophical summations of the cinematic world. Said project has the generative potential to create a paradigmatic shift in our social and cultural thinking; a shift that no doubt benefits us all.

P. Khalil Saucier, Professor of Critical Black Studies, Bucknell University, USA