This session examines the concept of “the world” in the thought of Tupac Shakur as a space structured by the negation of Black life through sexual stigmatization, carceral surveillance, and Black male vulnerability. Through close readings of tracks such as “F*** the World” and “Blasphemy,” it argues that juridical power and media function as mechanisms that render Black men objects of suspicion and punishment.
Situating Shakur within broader traditions of Black critique, the paper engages the notion of “thingification” to show how Black male life is constructed as inherently culpable. It further argues that Shakur articulates a form of racial eschatology, drawing on dispensationalist discourse while reorienting it toward present conditions. In this account, hell is not deferred but lived. Against this “world,” Shakur gestures toward a counter-eschatological horizon of Black peace and release.
With the approaching 30th anniversary of the tragic passing of Tupac Amaru Shakur, an appraisal of how Shakur conceived the idea of “future” is warranted, particularly in light of his consistent articulation and expectation of his early death. This paper explores Shakur’s notion of death as liberative against the terrors of modernity and its commitments to the subjugation, early death, and disappearance of Black persons. Within this framework, I pay particular attention to how Shakur critiques the organized vision of the future articulated within dispensationalist eschatology, a framework through which Black futures are rendered unavailable under the terms of modernity. Rather than imagining the present as a site where Black flourishing is possible, Shakur calls for the end of the world and its dominating logics while visually and sonically depicting Black flourishing in a deferred future—a Black heaven. This paper reads these themes through the song “Blasphemy” from The Don Killuminati: The Seven Day Theory and the video for “I Ain’t Mad at Cha.”