by Kara Keeling
NYU Press
4/16/2019, paperback
SKU: 9780814748336
A profound intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time
Queer Times, Black Futures considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism. Kara Keeling explores how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center Black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. In doing so, Keeling offers a sustained meditation on contemporary investments in futurity, speculation, and technology, paying particular attention to their significance to queer and Black freedom.
Keeling reads selected works, such as Sun Ra's 1972 film Space is the Place and the 2005 film The Aggressives, to juxtapose the Afrofuturist tradition of speculative imagination with the similar "speculations" of corporate and financial institutions. In connecting a queer, cinematic reordering of time with the new possibilities technology offers, Keeling thinks with and through a vibrant conception of the imagination as a gateway to queer times and Black futures, and the previously unimagined spaces that they can conjure.
Reviews:
"Not satisfied to leave readers in the abyss of endless critique, Keeling is concerned with alternative futures and the ethical imagination of 'the time after the future.' Queer Times, Black Futures is masterful--deeply engaging, wide ranging, carefully researched, and creative in its use of allegory to demonstrate the potential and effect of opacity for black futures and possibilities." -- Herman Gray, Emeritus Professor, UC Santa Cruz
"Not satisfied to leave readers in the abyss of endless critique, Keeling is concerned with alternative futures and the ethical imagination of 'the time after the future.' Queer Times, Black Futures is masterful--deeply engaging, wide ranging, carefully researched, and creative in its use of allegory to demonstrate the potential and effect of opacity for black futures and possibilities." -- Herman Gray, Emeritus Professor, UC Santa Cruz
"...an incredible, (im)possible work that is invested in worlds to come with the necessary caveat that its readers divest from a critical project that is measured in immediate returns." -- Courtney R. Baker Journal of Cinema and Media Studies
About the Author:
Kara Keeling is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Keeling is the author of The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense and the co-editor (with Josh Kun) of a selection of writings about sound and American Studies entitled Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies, and (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of European Pedigrees/African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing, a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead.