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

Kara Keeling contends that cinema and cinematic processes had a profound significance for twentieth-century anticapitalist Black Liberation movements based in the United States. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's notion of "the cinematic"-not just as a phenomenon confined to moving-image media such as film and television but as a set of processes involved in the production and reproduction of social reality itself -Keeling describes how the cinematic structures racism, homophobia, and misogyny, and, in the process, denies viewers access to certain images and ways of knowing. She theorizes the black femme as a figure who, even when not explicitly represented within hegemonic cinematic formulations of raced and gendered subjectivities, nonetheless haunts those representations, threatening to disrupt them by making alternative social arrangements visible.

Keeling draws on the thought of Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and others in addition to Deleuze. She pursues the elusive figure of the black femme through Haile Gerima's film Sankofa, images of women in the Black Panther Party, Pam Grier's roles in the blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, F. Gary Gray's film Set It Off, and Kasi Lemmons's Eve's Bayou.

Author: Kara Keeling
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 10/01/2007
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.69lbs
Size: 8.95h x 6.28w x 0.53d
ISBN: 9780822340256

About the Author

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.