The witch's flight : the cinematic, the Black femme, and the image of common sense / Kara Keeling.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Keeling, Kara, 1971-

Series:

Perverse modernities

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Lesbians in motion pictures.

Lesbianism in motion pictures.

African American women in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

xii, 209 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2007.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

1 The Image of Common Sense 11

2 In the Interval 27

3 "In Order to Move Forward": Common-Sense Black Nationalism and Haile Gerima's Sankofa 45

4 "We'll Just Have to Get Guns and Be Men": The Cinematic Appearance of Black Revolutionary Women 68

5 "A Black Belt in Bar Stool": Blaxploitation, Surplus, and The L Word 95

6 "What's Up with That? She Don't Talk?": Set It Off's Black Lesbian Butch-Femme 118

7 Reflections on the Black Femme's Role in the [Re]production of Cinematic Reality: The Case of Eve's Bayou 138.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [195]-202) and index.

ISBN:

9780822340133

0822340135

9780822340256

0822340259

OCLC:

122526800