FILM STUDIES/AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES/ QUEER THEORY
"Kara Keeling offers a tour de force extension of Deleuze's writings: she understands cinema as a form of thought, as well as a motor of a shared sensorium, capable of numbing repetition as well as provocative alternative visions. No 'De-leuzeobabble' here, though, just sweet grooves and careful readings. With lucid and piercing argument, Keeling is a serious critic of black visual culture, following a line of powerful litanies for survival from Frantz Fanon to Angela Davis to Fred Moten."
—AMY VILLAREJO, author of Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire
"There is a special alchemy at work in this wonderful project that transforms painstaking research and original theoretical insight into a superb understanding of the cinematic's deeply cathected relation to blackness, gender, and sexuality. Kara Keeling watches, reads, and stitches together a tapestry that teaches us how to re-read and re-think what we thought we knew already of visual culture, of the peculiarities of our social order's self-imagination, and of the survival of black femme desire."
—WAHNEEMA LUBIANO, editor of The House that Race Built
Kara Keeling contends that cinema and cinematic processes had a profound significance for twentieth-century anticapitalist Black Liberation movements based in the United States. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's notion of "the cinematic" —not just as a phenomenon confined to moving image media such as film and television but as a set of processes involved in the production and reproduction of social reality itself —Keel-ing describes how the cinematic structures racism, homophobia, and misogyny, and, in the process, denies viewers access to certain images and ways of knowing. She theorizes the black femme as a figure who, even when not explicitly represented within hegemonic cinematic formulations of raced and gendered subjectivities, nonetheless haunts those representations, threatening to disrupt them by making alternative social arrangements visible.
Keeling draws on the thought of Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and others in addition to Deleuze. She pursues the elusive figure of the black femme through Haile Gerima's film Sankofa, images of women in the Black Panther Party, Pam Grier's roles in the blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, F. Gary Gray's film Set It Off, and Kasi Lemmons's Eve's Bayou.
KARA KEELING is Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts and of African American Studies in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is a coeditor of James A. Snead's Racist Traces and Other Writings: European Pedigrees/African Contagions.
PERVERSE MODERNITIES: A Series Edited by Judith Halberstam and Lisa Lowe