The names alive are like the names in graves: Black life and black social death in Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin

This article has three principal points of focus: Terrance Hayes’ poetic response in his recent American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin to the experience of living a black life in an antiblack world; his thinking of black life in the age of Black Lives Matter as embodying the continuing afterlife and social death of slavery; and his fashioning of a style of lyric address within which to consider both the relationship between antiblackness and the libidinal economy of whiteness and white supremacy and the foundational role of antiblackness in organising American social reality for black and white identities.