Queer Times, Black Futures

A profound intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time

Queer Times, Black Futuresconsiders 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 filmSpace is the Placeand the 2005 filmThe 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.

Kara Keelingis Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Keeling is the author ofThe Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense(2007) and the co-editor (with Josh Kun) of a selection of writings about sound and American Studies entitledSound Clash: Listening to American Studies, and (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) ofEuropean Pedigrees/African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing, a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead.

• Publisher: NYU Press (April 16, 2019)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 288 pages
• ISBN-10: 0814748333
• ISBN-13: 9780814748336
• Item Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Dimensions: 6 x 0.73 x 9 inches