In the introduction to this special issue, the editors argue that permadeath games respond to the increasing prevalence of the social, ecological, psychological, and economic conditions of precarity. Permanent death, or permadeath, has experienced a renaissance of sorts with the release of games such as DayZ, Don’t Starve, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, One Chance and Minecraft. Permadeath games emphasize the precariousness of play by making defeat, failure, and death irrevocable, countering mainstream design paradigms that embrace infinite retries and the devaluation of death. Drawing on Judith Butler’s deployment of the term ‘precarity,’ the editors contend that permadeath’s resurgence is evidence of a growing awareness of the tenuousness of human existence, not only in economic terms, but also in terms that are moral and ecological. In other words, the recent rise in experiments with the mechanics of death might relate directly to contemporary issues such as anthropogenic climate change, neo-liberal economics and even the so-called death of the monolithic ‘gamer’ identity. Permadeath games are uniquely situated to voice the inherent precarity of what it means to live and play in the early twenty-first century.

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As the first African-American working as a commercial fashion photographer for mainstream outlets like Vogue and Life and a veteran of Roy Stryker's photography division at the Farm Security Administration, Gordon Parks documented the underappreciated visual history binding consumer culture to racial politics. Never one to shy away from on-the-nose social commentary or obvious political allegory, Parks has been seen as an important-but frustratingly unsubtle-middlebrow African-American photographer. 1 This is as true of his documentary images of black American life as it is of his commercial fashion photography. The fact that Parks also worked as a staff photographer for Life magazine for twenty years is often made to serve as irrefutable proof of his moderate politics and heavy-handed social commentary. 2 However, I intend in this article to put pressure on this assumption. I argue that what has been mistaken for political moderation in Parks's work is instead a direct engagement with the violence of self-evidence that ultimately undergirds bourgeois culture and politics.Working in the visual idiom of the middle class, Parks found a broad audience for his documentary photography as well as his fashion photography. By examining both types of Parks's photography alongside one another, I intend to highlight the ways in which each stands out for its unapologetic engagement with the middle-class white Americans whom Martin Luther King, Jr. would deem "the Negro's great stumbling block." 3 Parks spoke the visual language of the white middle class. 4 His photography m ode rnism / modernity volum e twe nty thre e , num b e r four, p p 789-811. © 2016 johns hop kins unive rsity p re ss