Queer Times, Black Futures by Kara Keeling (review)

With queer times, black futures, kara Keeling critically explores themes of temporality, spatiality, affect, futurity, and ultimately liberation through engagement with and theorizations of Blackness, queerness, and media. Opening with an invocation of Audre Lorde's "A Litany for Survival," Keeling positions this rich and compelling project as informed by the notion that "poetry is a way of thinking the space/time of politics for those deemed disposable . . . within the contexts of heteropatriarchy and white supremacy" (xi). Central to the text is poetry's role as a tool, or possibly a technology, for working through queer possibilities and futures: poetry's ability to incorporate affect and senses into the production of knowledge is something Keeling identifies as both radical and foundational to a serious consideration of Black futures.

Queer Times, Black Futures is, at its core, an interdisciplinary project animated by an ethos presented by Stuart Hall in his call for cultural studies to move toward, as Keeling explains, a "mode of scholarly production that imaginatively, yet seriously, engages with disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas' 'existing paradigms and traditions of knowledge' and 'empirical and concrete work' to construct a new scholarly terrain" (11). These logics are nested within Keeling's implementation of an approach informed by Gilles Deleuze's conception of "societies of control," which he posits as an iteration of Foucauldian "disciplinary societies"; thus, Keeling establishes, without explicitly liberatory or transformative aims, interdisciplinarity can "work as a mechanism of control" (12). In identifying this potential pitfall in her introduction, Keeling emphasizes the need to work outside of the boundaries constructed in such societies (identifying our present, based in racial capitalism, as one such society) and suggests the radical imagination as a key tool to do so.

To this end, the book is structured with persistent and poetic interruptions from Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" and various analyses of it. With these interludes, Keeling examines notions of power, space, time, and resistance—the refrain of the titular character of Melville's story is "I would prefer not to." Through sociocultural, theoretical, and historical contextualization of Bartleby and his creator, Melville, Keeling punctuates the primary chapters in the text with moments of radical, potentially queer, refusal. Other recurring theoretical and intellectual influences that appear throughout the dynamically referential text include Édouard Glissant, Gilbert Simondon, Beth Coleman, Frantz Fanon, José Esteban Muñoz, Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, and Octavia Butler.

The main chapters in Queer Times, Black Futures center on Black existence through readings of films, novels, and Afrofuturist imaginings, with what Keeling, quoting Saidiya Hartman, terms the "afterlife of slavery" as a sociohistorical backdrop (25). Chapter 1 utilizes the 1974 film Space Is the Place, cowritten by and starring Sun Ra, to think through the intellectual projects of Afrofuturism and its relationship with technology. Keeling explicates Sun Ra's assertion that Black people are "myths" that exist out of space and time, suggesting that this assertion highlights how the "myths" of modern life are also constructions and thus subject to deconstruction and reimagining (60–62). This ultimately opens up possibilities of "transindividuation," or collective identification aimed at the liberation of all. Chapter 2 focuses on affect, queerness as a material practice, and moments where those components intersect with Black, feminist, and queer politics, with attention to temporalities throughout (90). Keeling uses three Black queer films and Daniel Peddle's 2005 documentary The Aggressives to consider the range of political perspectives mentioned above and how they might be able to build from one another. One of Keeling's interruptions happens here, providing a transition to an examination of digital media that continues in chapter 3.

This third chapter, "Black Cinema and Questions concerning Film/Media/Technology," centers on the rise of the digital and argues that race can be understood as a technology, engaging the works of Black filmmakers John Akomfrah, Arthur Jafa, and Julie Dash. Keeling's fourth chapter generatively analyzes Grace Jones, Black femininity, and the dual considerations of hypervisibility...