The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense

Kara Keeling

Published by Duke University Press 2007

The Witch's Flight

The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense

Kara Keeling
Edited by: Judith Halberstam and Lisa Lowe

In the series Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822390145

Overview
Contents

About this book

Through an analysis of filmic representations of Black femininity, and the Black Femme in particular, this book highlights the ways "the cinematic" structures both racist and sexist portrayals, and their potential undoing.

Author / Editor information

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.

Reviews

“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 ‘Deleuzeobabble’ 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

“Methodologically, The Witch’s Flight fits squarely on the shelf with other film, visual, and media studies scholarship while also straddling critical U.S. historiography, queer theory, women’s studies, and critical race studies. And yet, its methodology represents more than an example of interdisciplinarity precisely because it uniquely embodies a field of thought working to understand its own implication in reproducing global capitalism, neoliberalism, and the ruse of representation.”

-- Stacy I. Macías GLQ

"[A] rich, provocative, deeply personal book. . . . Keeling's work is revelatory and refreshing; this is a book that continually engages the reader. Highly recommended.”

-- G. A. Foster Choice

"Keeling’s book is an astonishing example of how to do things with film and feminism.... Evidence that feminist film theory not only changes how you see the world, but changes the world itself."

-- Sophie Mayer British Film Institute

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Another Litany for Survival Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. The Image of Common Sense Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	11
2. In the Interval Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
3. ‘‘In Order to Move Forward’’ Common-Sense Black Nationalism and Haile Gerima’s Sankofa Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
4. ‘‘We’ll Just Have to Get Guns and Be Men’’ The Cinematic Appearance of Black Revolutionary Women Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	68
5. ‘‘A Black Belt in Bar Stool’’ Blaxploitation, Surplus, and The L Word Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	95
6. ‘‘What’s Up with That? She Don’t Talk?’’ Set It O√’s Black Lesbian Butch-Femme Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	118
7. Reflections on the Black Femme’s Role in the (Re)production of Cinematic Reality The Case of Eve’s Bayou Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	138
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	195
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	203

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 222
Illustrations
- Other: 1 b&w photo

eBook

Published: November 5, 2007
ISBN: 9780822390145