The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (review)

Kara Keeling’s first book, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, is an ambitious attempt to use the image of the black lesbian butch-femme to challenge the common sense image—as theorized by Gilles Deleuze—of “the black” and the cinematic representation of the black as a “problem.” Keeling utilizes Deleuze’s analysis of the cinematic in which he theorizes the influence of cinema and the image and the effects that both of these have on society’s accepted notions of people. She uses Deleuze’s writing as a framework for her own analysis and pairs it with Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the black imago in his seminal text, Black Skin, White Masks. With this unique pairing Keeling presents an alternative to the ways in which “the black” is imagined and perceived through images, and how this identity becomes formed and, at times, challenged. Keeling analyzes how first the singular category black, and then the black woman (particularly the black butch-femme) are dealt with through their images in the Black Panther Party (BPP), Haile Germina’s film Sankofa, F. Gary Gray’s movie Set It Off, Kasi Lemmon’s film Eve’s Bayou, blaxploitation films, and even Showtime’s production of The L Word. Keeling explains why she chooses these populations in her analysis saying, “I pay attention to black common sense and, later, to butch-femme common sense in an attempt to reveal where these conceptions of the world and the modes of sensory-motor habituation through which they are supported and expressed harbor viable alternatives to white bourgeoisie north American common sense” (p. 21).

Keeling lays out the theoretical groundwork for the rest of her analysis within her first two chapters. The first chapter looks at the writings of Deleuze with particular emphasis on one of the major terms she painstakingly describes, and which becomes a major part of her analysis throughout the book, the idea of “common sense.” For Keeling, common sense can be understood as, “a collective set of memory-images available for memory to direct onto a perception carved out according to a collective motor habituation” (p. 18). To complement Deleuze’s analysis, because it lacks any real or sustained analysis of how race functions with images and cinema, in chapter two she utilizes the analysis done by Frantz Fanon, specifically around the idea of “the black imago.” She uses his analysis to reframe the “problems” of cinematic representations by calling for a shift in thinking that will understand both “the black image” and “the white image” as inherently problematic (as opposed to “the black image” alone) and that the black image might be best understood in terms of the spatiotemporal relations it makes visible (p. 29). This pairing works well throughout her book to help her make sense of how the black imago evolves and the effect that this evolution has on both black common sense and the black identity. Black common sense can be understood as the everyday imagery, often stereotypes, conjured up when thinking or discussing black people. This imagery often functions in the realm of the visual imaginary and is consumed by multiple audiences in distinct and contradictory ways regardless of the race of the consumer.

Black nationalism is a thread that connects a number of the films and time periods that Keeling explores in this book. Black nationalism is first introduced in chapter three where she engages Haile Gerima’s Sankofa (1993). She uses Gerima’s film as an example of how the black woman in cinema can be used to challenge the “problems” of cinematic representations of the black, as the cinematic representation of the black is often presented as being merely the various stereotypes of black masculinity (such as the violent black buck). She moves from the analysis of film to look briefly at the BPP during the Black Power...