The Witchs Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense

Description

Kara Keeling contends that cinema and cinematic processes had a profound significance for twentieth-century anti-capitalist 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.;Introduction : Another litany for survival -- The image of common sense -- In the interval -- "In order to move forward" : common-sense Black Nationalism and Haile Gerima's Sankofa -- "We'll just have to get guns and be men" : the cinematic appearance of Black revolutionary women -- "A black belt in bar stool" : blaxploitation, surplus, and The L Word -- "What's up with that? She don't talk?" : Set It Off's Black lesbian butch-femme -- Reflections on the Black femme's role in the (re)production of cinematic reality : the case of Eve's Bayou. Introduction : Another litany for survival -- The image of common sense -- In the interval -- "In order to move forward" : common-sense Black Nationalism and Haile Gerima's Sankofa -- "We'll just have to get guns and be men" : the cinematic appearance of Black revolutionary women -- "A black belt in bar stool" : blaxploitation, surplus, and The L Word -- "What's up with that? She don't talk?" : Set It Off's Black lesbian butch-femme -- Reflections on the Black femme's role in the (re)production of cinematic reality : the case of Eve's Bayou.