Witch's Flight

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.

“Kara Keeling offers a tour de force extension of Deleuze’s writings: she understands cinema as a form of thought, as well as a motor of a shared sensorium, capable of numbing repetition as well as provocative alternative visions. No ‘Deleuzeobabble’ here, though, just sweet grooves and careful readings. With lucid and piercing argument, Keeling is a serious critic of black visual culture, following a line of powerful litanies for survival from Frantz Fanon to Angela Davis to Fred Moten.”-Amy Villarejo, author of Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire “There is a special alchemy at work in this wonderful project that transforms painstaking research and original theoretical insight into a superb understanding of the cinematic’s deeply cathected relation to blackness, gender, and sexuality. Kara Keeling watches, reads, and stitches together a tapestry that teaches us how to re-read and re-think what we thought we knew already of visual culture, of the peculiarities of our social order’s self-imagination, and of the survival of black femme desire.”-Wahneema Lubiano, editor of The House that Race Built “Methodologically, The Witch’s Flight fits squarely on the shelf with other film, visual, and media studies scholarship while also straddling critical U.S. historiography, queer theory, women’s studies, and critical race studies. And yet, its methodology represents more than an example of interdisciplinarity precisely because it uniquely embodies a field of thought working to understand its own implication in reproducing global capitalism, neoliberalism, and the ruse of representation.” - Stacy I. Macías (GLQ) "[A] rich, provocative, deeply personal book. . . . Keeling's work is revelatory and refreshing; this is a book that continually engages the reader. Highly recommended.” - G. A. Foster (Choice) "Keeling’s book is an astonishing example of how to do things with film and feminism.... Evidence that feminist film theory not only changes how you see the world, but changes the world itself." - Sophie Mayer (British Film Institute)

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: Another Litany for Survival 11. The Image of Common Sense 112. In the Interval 273. “In Order to Move Forward”: Common-Sense Black Nationalism and Haile Gerima’s Sankofa 454. “We’ll Just Have to Get Guns and Be Men”: The Cinematic Appearance of Black Revolutionary Women 685. “A Black Belt in Bar Stool”: Blaxploitation, Surplus, and The L Word 956. “What’s Up With That? She Don’t Talk?”: Set It Off’s Black Lesbian Butch-Femme 1187. Reflections on the Black Femme’s Role in the [Re]production of Cinematic Reality: The Case of Eve’s Bayou 138Notes 159Bibliography 195Index 203