The Figure of the Black Femme and Her Radical Elsewhere

In The Witch’s Flight, Kara Keeling seeks to reveal through analyses of black film how cinematic processes structure the experience of our globalized twenty-first-century reality. Keeling focuses on black cinema with a keen eye directed at the rarely seen, just negligible, or violently eclipsed black femme, a spectral figure who — surviving under the yoke of common sense, black cultural nationalism, and cinematic reality — represents a possibility of disrupting the regime of the visual and its hegemonic prescriptions. Set to its own musical soundtrack with firm instructions on when to push play, Keeling’s book excavates without compunction from mainstream black cinema an alternative archive of temporality, affect, and ultimately reality. For Keeling, to apprehend an alternative social reality where the processes rationalizing dominant notions of memory, perception, time, labor, race, gender, sexuality, and capital are brought into sharp relief means to find and follow the trajectory of the cinematic presence and absence of the black femme. Along the path of encountering the black femme and all her problematic and sublime offerings, we must also contend with the force of the cinematic, “a term through which to shuttle a complicated aggregate of capitalist social relations, sensory-motor arrangements, and cognitive processes” (3).

In the first two chapters, Keeling introduces the elaborate conceptual framework she uses to critique black visual culture. Contextualizing the theoretical insights of Henri Bergson (affect), Gilles Deleuze (the cinematic), Antonio Gramsci (common sense), and Frantz Fanon (temporality), Keeling invents a highly intricate theory to argue that via the cinematic, sensory-motor schema tend to overlay present perception with past images and in so doing achieve familiar recognition in the form of common sense, or cliché, which circumscribes any radically different perception of the future. In other words, when film viewers imbibe a common memory image projected on a screen, the capacity for critical thinking to overcome the power of habituated affect is potentially halted. Imagined futures, alternative becomings, and radical elsewheres consequently dematerialize within the logic of the cinematic and its impulse to advance global capitalism and achieve consent via the facade of redistributive justice. Common sense, however, is never only monolithic or depotentializing; shielded within it are the “seeds of good sense” that “may enable another type of mental and/or motor movement to occur, thereby enabling an alternate perception” (22, 14).

The book’s following chapters offer original analysis of how black cinematic productions unwittingly reproduce and inadvertently create hegemonic and counterhegemonic common senses often to the detriment of the black femme figure. Beginning with a consideration of the commonsense black nationalism paramount to Haile Gerima’s Sankofa (1993), Keeling describes how it relies on a conscientious albeit predictable narrative of slave resistance commensurate with the image of the black male subject, which renders black femininity and the black femme — often indexing black existence to passivity, sexual availability, and inhumanity — a present impossibility. To recall Joon Oluchi Lee’s relevant insight, “the specific femme style of a racialized, black, girl, like the castrated boy, has its origin in violence.”¹

In chapter 4 I found one of Keeling’s most evocative arguments on the (f)utility of black nationalism’s masculinity, one that may rattle black feminist theorizations. Black Panther Party members — as “blacks with guns” — appearing on television news and in print media catalyzed an alternative image of the Black who was not inferior but forthrightly armed to break with hegemonic black common sense. Ushered into this visual economy were black women as “blacks with guns,” thereby signaling an emergent and radically configured masculinity detached from strict black male inhabitation. As part of the horizon of possibilities for alternative structures of existence, black nationalism’s masculinity — before it was habituated — recognized the subjectivity of black women, who had been virulently denied the protection of femininity afforded to pious, pure, and domestic white bourgeois women.

The second half of The Witch’s Flight considers the blaxploitation films made from...