There are rare occurrences when you have the opportunity to hear truly iconic authors, and this was one. I had been incredibly excited for the presentation from Kara Keeling, having read some of Queer Times, Black Futures (available here) I was really looking forward to hearing her speak about it in her own words. And the talk (of course) exceeded all of my expectations! This brief write up does not do justice to the eloquence and breadth of ideas that Keeling spoke to, so if you haven’t already, read her work, and take any opportunity to listen to her speak, and learn.
She started her talk by generously describing some of the context for writing Queer Times, Black Futures, which grew from questions raised in the writing of her monograph The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme and the Image of Common Sense in 2007 (also available here). Because of this, she started with a brief reading from the last chapter of that work, entitled ‘Reflections on the Black femmes role in the reproduction of cinematic reality – the case of Eve’s Bayou.’ The chapter is a close reading of the final sequence of Kasi Lemmons’ film, where two of the main characters are discussing an event central to the narrative of the film, a kiss between a father and one daughter, where the second daughter who has the gift of sight, is able to ‘see’ what actually happened by touching her sister. This reveals to her and the audience the sequence of events. Keeling described that for her, this offered an “opening for how film makes perceptible elements of subterranean social realities that pose a challenge to dominant common sense conceptions of race, gender and sexuality” and while there are no explicitly queer characters, that here the film demonstrated its capacity for disrupting the hegemonic conceptions of social reality, something which gave Keeling enormous potential to explore further. She named this the ‘black femme function’ which she describes at page 137 of The Witch’s Flight as pointing“to a radical elsewhere, that is outside homogenous space and time and that does not belong to the order of the visible.” This insight into some of the driving force behind Queer Times, Black Futures was incredibly useful for understanding how Keeling reaches the idea of the existence of a radical elsewhere (from Deleuze), and how this is deemed irrational by hegemonic discourses, and upsets normative categories. This was also complimented by questions arising from the difference she saw that digital media and digital technologies make in the operation of what she refers to as “the Cinematic.”
The concept of the Cinematic is significant across both The Witch’s Flight, and Queer Times, Black Futures, particularly in the former. She also quoted from p3 of The Witch’s Flight to demonstrate this, where she discusses Deleuze’s approach from the notion of cinema as movement, to one of temporality. She acknowledged that there are certain elements of the non-cinematic that could be included here, other forms of visual media like television, but the key is that these phenomena were initiated with the invention of film technology, so cinema is the central impetus for what she considers as forming the Cinematic as a form of existence and reality. She also described the Cinematic as a way to characterize the 20th century reality, because it has been so central in forming our perceptions of what reality is. Almost everyone alive was born within the era of the moving image, and its prominent position in society has been in place for so long that it is impossible to escape its influence and relevance to how we form ideas of reality today.
For Keeling, she described how these ideas came to the forefront of writing Queer Times, Black Futures to enable a greater understanding of the significance of these technologies to “black, queer and trans political possibilities.” Here then, is also where the interest and relevance of Afrofuturism stems from, which features in the first chapter of the book. She described how, in 2009 when she started the initial queries of the book, there was a resurgence of interest in its aesthetics and politics which was particularly inspiring to her. The 1974 film ‘The Space is the Place’ in particular, and the role of Sun Ra helped form her queries of societies of control, and again here the link between the Deleuzian themes flow through both The Witch’s Flight and Queer Times, Black Futures. Keeling read a passage from this first chapter to demonstrate this, which ended that “The digital regime of the image is a component of what Deleuze elsewhere refers to as societies of control. The digital regime of the image facilitates the phase of racial capitalism Jodi Melamed has called ‘neoliberal multiculturalism.’”
Keeling stated that while the book started as an exploration of Afrofuturism, black and queer studies, in the process of writing it evolved into considering larger “conceptual and political questions” about the potential realities created by the Cinematic, and the capacity of the imagination to create new realities within racial capitalism, societies of control, and “the spatial temporal parameters” of what she called provisionally “trans queer black liberation.” Her phrasing is just phenomenal so my direct quotes are to preserve those!
She also described how the diversions in Queer Times, Black Futures to Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener serve to illuminate her questions about power, language, space, time and resistance, and the constant interruptions to the speculations on futurity and the impossible possibilities disrupt the reader too. Bartleby is most well-known for his refrain of “I would prefer not to” and this radical refusal serves as a torchlight for Keeling’s same notions of negation of power structures. These create a link between Keeling’s own queries, and Melville’s, which cannot be divested from the colonial slave trade that formed the speculations, and Melville’s characters even though it never directly refers to it. There are other reasons that Keeling uses Bartleby, but the most illuminating was how Keeling departs from Delueze’s reflections on Bartleby’s ‘queer formula; instead of leading to conclusions on Bartleby’s disengagement with “ontological, epistemological, material violences of the quotidian organization of things” they can instead be understood as examples of “radical refusal, a decreative, unaccountable, ungovernable errant insistence that confront such violences head on, in search of an expressive realization of existence beyond measure.” Wow.
She described how now, post-publication, and thinking about moving onto other things, (similar to how she moved from The Witch’s Flight using the questions that arose in it to the eventual themes for Queer Times, Black Futures), these ideas of the ‘existence beyond measure’ are inspiring new ideas and thoughts. Finally, she described how hard it is to be able to describe the ideas of Queer Times, Black Futures in short book talks because of the intertwining of ideas throughout all the chapters, and the Bartleby sections, including considerations on the formations of cinema, media studies, gender studies, and queer theory and black studies disciplines. She described it as a work on social theory first and foremost.
In closing, she turned to the final chapter of Queer Times, Black Futures, entitled‘World Galaxy’ which she described as being “organized as an improvisational intellectual scholarly enterprise.” It draws on the refrains from Deleuze & Guattari’s 1000 Plateaus which argue that everything is either directed to three elements, either in the dark, at home, or to the world, which she described as a helpful way of thinking for any creative process. She also referred to Glissant’s work on the poetics of relation, and opacity for enabling different logics of relation, allowing for an openness with the means by which we came to be where we are, historically and politically. This other world creation allows for the impossible to become possible, a concept that Keeling has explored throughout the book. She also refers to Alice Coltrane in this final chapter, as a contrast to Sun Ra’s jazz explorations, which turn inward instead of outward, but similarly contradict Western colonial legacies. She ended by reading a wonderful quote from this last chapter, which I encourage you to read in its entirety as a short section of it here cannot justify the eloquence and succinct coming together of ideas and concepts that Keeling turns. The final page of the book draws from Deleuze and Guattari, and simply states ‘toward the world,’ encouraging the reader to do just that, to challenge preconceptions, present conditions, and to create new worlds and possibilities for ourselves.
I cannot describe how profoundly this talk, and the book that Keeling has written affected me, and presumably all who read her work. It is aspirational, inspirational, and provocative in ways that are hard to capture. I can only hope that in being so challenged that the torch that she sets afire keeps burning, and I cannot wait to hear her speak again, and to read new work when it arises.