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Reviewed by:
  • Queer Times, Black Futures by Kara Keeling
  • Courtney R. Baker (bio)
Queer Times, Black Futures
by Kara Keeling
New York University Press. Sexual Cultures series.
2019. 288 pages.
$89.00 hardcover; $30.00 paper; also available in e-book.

Queer Times, Black Futures examines and models the "'freedom dreams' that issue from Afrofuturist imaginings . . . so that those of us living today . . . can consider what in those freedom dreams might survive us and our limited perceptions."1 The book's prose and logic strive toward the poetic, in the senses intended by both Karl Marx and Audre Lorde, as "poetry has the capacity to deterritorialize language, making uncommon, queer sense available to thought."2

Kara Keeling's effort echoes Lorde's excavation of deep-earth Black wisdom that, as the late poet writes, becomes a "jewel in . . . open light" and that might service what historian Robin Kelley has termed freedom dreams—"the dream of a new world" entertained and envisioned by activists and artists that might form the "catalyst for . . . political engagement" in our time.3 Keeling enhances Kelley's principle by considering Nassim Nicholas Taleb's trope of the "Black Swan event," which is "characterized by 'a combination of low predictability and large impact'" and manifests as reliance upon what is known rather than the inevitable eruptions of the unknown.4 Keeling leverages Taleb's principle to explain how the long history of revolutions can still be narrated as surprises within the colonial mindset. The supposedly unforeseen Black freedom dreams that gain from disorder have appeared as, variously, the Haitian Revolution (which "proved that Black belonging, anchored in love of freedom and of Black people, could be an antifragile revolutionary force") and in "Black culture, as technē," characterized by "mobility, dispersion, disruptive [End Page 164] potential, and endurance."5 Freedom dreams are also, as Keeling demonstrates in her book, expressed in such layered texts as Grace Jones's video for "Corporate Cannibal" as well as C. L. R. James's 1953 study Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways.6

This orientation toward a more just future to come—one that "requires (recreation and imagination"—is recognized as "what Frantz Fanon referred to as a 'real leap.' "7 Keeling's interest in these potentialities, "(re)turns," and "the (im)possible" is constructed as anticapital; the resources she identifies are for the enactment of a sustainable, ethical world that is not just divested from but radically un-invested in property accumulation, and the injustices that follow investment in those capitalist, settler-colonial fictions.8 If poetry resists the lure of rendering the felt into material, so too does it effectively transmit queer dreams of a radical future because "[p]oetry is a way of entering the unknown and carrying back the impossible."9

Keeling's book resonates with Stephen Best's 2018 monograph, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life, in their shared concern about the character of Black study and the utopianism of queer thought.10 But whereas Best is invested in critiquing the Black history-bound subject of Afropessimism and the queer utopian subject who is alienated from an insistence upon a future bound up with narratives of reproduction, Keeling's approach seems much more expansive in its characterization of Black and queer radicalism. That is, Keeling targets not those subject to time and space but the subjectivizing functions of temporality and spatiality Black and queer ontologies are less recognizable sites of resistance in Queer Times, Black Futures than they are recurring surprises and disruptions of social orders. These radical breaks are what Keeling terms, after Marx, "poetry from the future."11 However, she enhances that phrase with the poetic theory of Lorde, whose injunction that "poetry is not a luxury" imbues functionalist Marxism with the Black-femme-wit of poetry's capacity to combat "the estrangement of the senses by Capital."12 As Keeling explains, "'poetry from the future' interrupts the habitual formation of bodies, and it serves as an index of a time to come when today exists potently even if not (yet) effectively, but escapes us, will find its time."13 This gesture deprivileges the present as well as the subject of the present, preferring "what Octavia...

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