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Queer Times, Black Futures
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.
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.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published April 16, 2019
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About the author
Kara Keeling
12 books18 followersKara 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 (2007) 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.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 8, 2020
Keeling's language is dazzling. What is the spatiotemporality of freedom? And other brilliant musings:
On Lorde's feminism as queer theory & poetic knowledge:
"Throughout her writings, Lorde insistently returns us to the stubborn spatiotemporalities of our senses as a way to intervene in the smooth and seductive assertions of capitalism’s inevitability...the stubborn facticity of what we understand to be our bodies and their senses..." (xi)
"Language is a vehicle through which sensory knowledge is parsed into common senses, and poetry has the capacity to deterritorialize language, making uncommon, queer senses available to thought. Poetry is a way of entering the unknown and carrying back the impossible..." (xii)
On interdisciplinarity & knowledge production:
"Their future scenarios are part of a knowledge project that has been calibrated to reproduce existing relations." (9)
"As a way to engage with the world that might direct attention to what Capital has not (yet) taken into account, interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship emerges in accordance with the needs of finance capital." (10)
"As the antithetical interests of Shell Oil’s energy scenarios, on the one hand, and projects invested in Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty, on the other, make clear, the politics of imaginative knowledge production are by no means guaranteed." (15)
"It might be said that queer is endogenous to time. Along the axis of the social, Capital must manage queer’s proliferation of errant, irrational, and unpredictable connections in the interests of objectifying and delivering reliable futures." (19) queer = structuring antagonism of the social
On speculative finance capital:
"Following Bryan and Rafferty, Grossberg reminds his readers that, while derivatives often have been grasped in their function as financial instruments that manage risk, their primary function is to commensurate value." (16)
"My attempt to bring the present political economy of finance into conversation with cultural politics is consistent with Randy Martin’s call, writing in collaboration with Bryan and Rafferty, for an interdisciplinary scholarship calibrated to assess and address the changes wrought by financialization." (26) a blueprint!
Marin, Bryan, Rafferty: situate financialization in capital’s genealogy, and, importantly, as subtended by 'real relations' rather than the fictitious ones often attributed to finance capital because of its intimacy with speculation
Baucom: As commodity capital is to the nineteenth century’s intensification of the seventeenth, so finance capital is to the long twentieth century’s intensification of the eighteenth. Zong massacre reveals the economy of the transatlantic slave trade was a speculative one/the logics of the social character of finance capital. "The time it took to complete the vast triangular circuit of the trade dictated that merchants must conduct much of their business on credit. But for such a system of credit to operate both a theory of knowledge and a form of value which would secure the credibility of the system itself had to be in place. Central to that theory was a mutual and system-wide determination to credit the existence of imaginary values. Central to that form of value was a reversal of the protocols of value creation proper to commodity capital. For here, value does not follow but precedes exchange (not, to be sure, as the classical Marxist account has it, in the form of that use value that is held to preexist the moment of exchange, but as what Marx understood to be the end product rather than the originary moment of capital: as money value, value in the guise of the “general equivalent”). Such value exists not because a purchase has been made and goods exchanged but because two or more parties have agreed to believe in it. Exchange, here, does not create value, it retrospectively confirms it, offers belated evidence to what already exists."
"Computation meets flesh and culture in the ongoing production and reproduction of Black existence." (29)
On opacity:
"To insist upon a group’s 'right to opacity' in sociocultural terms, therefore, is to challenge the processes of commensuration built into the demand for that group to become perceptible according to existing conceptions of the world. It is a way of asserting the existence in this world of another conception of the world, incomprehensible from within the common senses that secure existing hegemonic relations and their “computations of relative value.” (31)
On queer times, Black futures:
"'Black futures' emerges here as a way of indicating an investment in the risk that already inheres in social life..." (32)
On Bartleby:
"Bent not toward redemption but 'de-creation,' Bartleby is a figure who unsettles the existing social organization of things." He stops laboring to reproduce what was, he stops making equivalences, he saves what was not, rather than restore what was. (49)
"Radically antisocial, Bartleby does not sit in an antagonistic relationship vis-à-vis the social; rather, he prefers not to inhabit the social at all..." (50)
On Sun Ra:
"The idea that music might affect vibrations and energy patterns and, hence, consciousness aligns with the ideas of other avant-garde artists of the 1950s and 1960s..." (56)
On Black existence:
"'Black existence' as a historical sensibility anchored in the ongoing transformation of the world, related but not bound to genetic or otherwise biological categories premised on the continuity of specific bloodlines." (66)
"If, historically, Black existence (that is, the material and cultural realities and expressions indexed but not wholly contained by the persistent presence of those we call “Black people” over time) is tethered to a notion of fungibility, as several people have argued, it might be grasped as itself speculative, characterized by an incommensurability that is inherent to it and has been finessed and managed by a variety of techniques and strategies of commensuration, measure, computation, and calculation." (173)
On affect:
"Throughout this book, my attempt to articulate something that exceeds its expression inevitably also produces a surplus, one that cannot be seen or understood, but is nevertheless present as affect." (82)
"It is a felt presence of the unknowable, the content of which exceeds its expression and therefore points toward a different epistemological, if not ontological and empirical, regime." (83)
On balancing Munoz and Edelman:
"I share both Muñoz’s and Freeman’s visions of alternatives to the antirelational approach in Queer Theory; still, I want to retain something of an investment in the labor of the negative, but without reifying a dialectic in which there is negation and negation of the negation. Referring to the capacity of “queer” to function as a structuring antagonism within the social as “antirelational” misses the ways “queer” is a product of social relation, a condition of possibility for sociality as we know it. It is a mode of relationality that generates surprising, pleasurable excess within the social precisely because it is structurally antagonistic to the properly social." (88)
On space/time:
"M—’s disappearance must prompt us to ask not the policing question attuned to the temporal and spatial logics of surveillance and control (Where is M— today?), but, rather, in this case, the political question of when M—’s visibility will enable M—’s survival by providing the protection that the realm of the visible affords those whose existence is valued, those we want to look for so we can look out for, and look after, them." (102)
On Grace Jones's "Corporate Cannibal" and Arthur Jafa's "Dreams":
"racialized economy of desire" (151)
"the boundaries between public and private—the distinction upon which notions of sexual propriety, self-determination, and ownership rest—are precisely where surplus value is generated" (154)
"the condition of boundarylessness (both in the sense of excess and in the sense of an absence of enforceable sovereign boundaries) that, it might be argued, attends every feminine Black American’s entry into some mode of legibility." (154)
"Jordan’s understanding of the role her nakedness plays in Magic City refuses to entertain the injunction that she seize control of her skin and enforce her ownership over it in a way that might be widely recognized as “proper.” It is a refusal to posit her flesh as something that can be owned, by herself or by anyone else. As such, it makes possible a different configuration of self, other, and the world than that which demands that someone own each body, and it offers something like stewardship in place of enclosure." (154)
the historical production of the category of "Black woman" (stitching racialization to a nexus of property, profit, power), how might stewardship vs. ownership disrupt that ontological coherency?
Conclusion:
"Though it may be imperceptible, that other world is accruing value (if there will be such a thing) here and now." (196)
"The fantastic queer times of our lives support unpredictable alliances, theories, knowledges, and connections that might operate on a register that is incommensurate with the calculated risks speculative capital already assumes through its investments in existing relations, even as, perhaps, such unpredictable and random connections have been anticipated, domesticated, dominated, and conquered in advance.
Perhaps." (213)
On Lorde's feminism as queer theory & poetic knowledge:
"Throughout her writings, Lorde insistently returns us to the stubborn spatiotemporalities of our senses as a way to intervene in the smooth and seductive assertions of capitalism’s inevitability...the stubborn facticity of what we understand to be our bodies and their senses..." (xi)
"Language is a vehicle through which sensory knowledge is parsed into common senses, and poetry has the capacity to deterritorialize language, making uncommon, queer senses available to thought. Poetry is a way of entering the unknown and carrying back the impossible..." (xii)
On interdisciplinarity & knowledge production:
"Their future scenarios are part of a knowledge project that has been calibrated to reproduce existing relations." (9)
"As a way to engage with the world that might direct attention to what Capital has not (yet) taken into account, interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship emerges in accordance with the needs of finance capital." (10)
"As the antithetical interests of Shell Oil’s energy scenarios, on the one hand, and projects invested in Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty, on the other, make clear, the politics of imaginative knowledge production are by no means guaranteed." (15)
"It might be said that queer is endogenous to time. Along the axis of the social, Capital must manage queer’s proliferation of errant, irrational, and unpredictable connections in the interests of objectifying and delivering reliable futures." (19) queer = structuring antagonism of the social
On speculative finance capital:
"Following Bryan and Rafferty, Grossberg reminds his readers that, while derivatives often have been grasped in their function as financial instruments that manage risk, their primary function is to commensurate value." (16)
"My attempt to bring the present political economy of finance into conversation with cultural politics is consistent with Randy Martin’s call, writing in collaboration with Bryan and Rafferty, for an interdisciplinary scholarship calibrated to assess and address the changes wrought by financialization." (26) a blueprint!
Marin, Bryan, Rafferty: situate financialization in capital’s genealogy, and, importantly, as subtended by 'real relations' rather than the fictitious ones often attributed to finance capital because of its intimacy with speculation
Baucom: As commodity capital is to the nineteenth century’s intensification of the seventeenth, so finance capital is to the long twentieth century’s intensification of the eighteenth. Zong massacre reveals the economy of the transatlantic slave trade was a speculative one/the logics of the social character of finance capital. "The time it took to complete the vast triangular circuit of the trade dictated that merchants must conduct much of their business on credit. But for such a system of credit to operate both a theory of knowledge and a form of value which would secure the credibility of the system itself had to be in place. Central to that theory was a mutual and system-wide determination to credit the existence of imaginary values. Central to that form of value was a reversal of the protocols of value creation proper to commodity capital. For here, value does not follow but precedes exchange (not, to be sure, as the classical Marxist account has it, in the form of that use value that is held to preexist the moment of exchange, but as what Marx understood to be the end product rather than the originary moment of capital: as money value, value in the guise of the “general equivalent”). Such value exists not because a purchase has been made and goods exchanged but because two or more parties have agreed to believe in it. Exchange, here, does not create value, it retrospectively confirms it, offers belated evidence to what already exists."
"Computation meets flesh and culture in the ongoing production and reproduction of Black existence." (29)
On opacity:
"To insist upon a group’s 'right to opacity' in sociocultural terms, therefore, is to challenge the processes of commensuration built into the demand for that group to become perceptible according to existing conceptions of the world. It is a way of asserting the existence in this world of another conception of the world, incomprehensible from within the common senses that secure existing hegemonic relations and their “computations of relative value.” (31)
On queer times, Black futures:
"'Black futures' emerges here as a way of indicating an investment in the risk that already inheres in social life..." (32)
On Bartleby:
"Bent not toward redemption but 'de-creation,' Bartleby is a figure who unsettles the existing social organization of things." He stops laboring to reproduce what was, he stops making equivalences, he saves what was not, rather than restore what was. (49)
"Radically antisocial, Bartleby does not sit in an antagonistic relationship vis-à-vis the social; rather, he prefers not to inhabit the social at all..." (50)
On Sun Ra:
"The idea that music might affect vibrations and energy patterns and, hence, consciousness aligns with the ideas of other avant-garde artists of the 1950s and 1960s..." (56)
On Black existence:
"'Black existence' as a historical sensibility anchored in the ongoing transformation of the world, related but not bound to genetic or otherwise biological categories premised on the continuity of specific bloodlines." (66)
"If, historically, Black existence (that is, the material and cultural realities and expressions indexed but not wholly contained by the persistent presence of those we call “Black people” over time) is tethered to a notion of fungibility, as several people have argued, it might be grasped as itself speculative, characterized by an incommensurability that is inherent to it and has been finessed and managed by a variety of techniques and strategies of commensuration, measure, computation, and calculation." (173)
On affect:
"Throughout this book, my attempt to articulate something that exceeds its expression inevitably also produces a surplus, one that cannot be seen or understood, but is nevertheless present as affect." (82)
"It is a felt presence of the unknowable, the content of which exceeds its expression and therefore points toward a different epistemological, if not ontological and empirical, regime." (83)
On balancing Munoz and Edelman:
"I share both Muñoz’s and Freeman’s visions of alternatives to the antirelational approach in Queer Theory; still, I want to retain something of an investment in the labor of the negative, but without reifying a dialectic in which there is negation and negation of the negation. Referring to the capacity of “queer” to function as a structuring antagonism within the social as “antirelational” misses the ways “queer” is a product of social relation, a condition of possibility for sociality as we know it. It is a mode of relationality that generates surprising, pleasurable excess within the social precisely because it is structurally antagonistic to the properly social." (88)
On space/time:
"M—’s disappearance must prompt us to ask not the policing question attuned to the temporal and spatial logics of surveillance and control (Where is M— today?), but, rather, in this case, the political question of when M—’s visibility will enable M—’s survival by providing the protection that the realm of the visible affords those whose existence is valued, those we want to look for so we can look out for, and look after, them." (102)
On Grace Jones's "Corporate Cannibal" and Arthur Jafa's "Dreams":
"racialized economy of desire" (151)
"the boundaries between public and private—the distinction upon which notions of sexual propriety, self-determination, and ownership rest—are precisely where surplus value is generated" (154)
"the condition of boundarylessness (both in the sense of excess and in the sense of an absence of enforceable sovereign boundaries) that, it might be argued, attends every feminine Black American’s entry into some mode of legibility." (154)
"Jordan’s understanding of the role her nakedness plays in Magic City refuses to entertain the injunction that she seize control of her skin and enforce her ownership over it in a way that might be widely recognized as “proper.” It is a refusal to posit her flesh as something that can be owned, by herself or by anyone else. As such, it makes possible a different configuration of self, other, and the world than that which demands that someone own each body, and it offers something like stewardship in place of enclosure." (154)
the historical production of the category of "Black woman" (stitching racialization to a nexus of property, profit, power), how might stewardship vs. ownership disrupt that ontological coherency?
Conclusion:
"Though it may be imperceptible, that other world is accruing value (if there will be such a thing) here and now." (196)
"The fantastic queer times of our lives support unpredictable alliances, theories, knowledges, and connections that might operate on a register that is incommensurate with the calculated risks speculative capital already assumes through its investments in existing relations, even as, perhaps, such unpredictable and random connections have been anticipated, domesticated, dominated, and conquered in advance.
Perhaps." (213)
March 22, 2023
i really. did not expect this book to spend so much time talking abt bartleby the scrivener
June 16, 2020
Keeling’s book is not the easiest to get through but it possesses great sections, epigraphs, citations and structural analyses.
Keeling introduces us to the concepts of “spatio-temporality” in relation to Queerness and “opacity” in relation to Afrofuturism, or as Keeling puts it, Black futures—(these terms are quite complex to concisely describe in a short review).
Queer Times Black Futures is endowed with various references to media formats such as albums, films, literary works & more. It also attends to the crude arithmetics of capitalism today and how capitalism continues to repurpose itself with futuristic languages i.e. “the imagination” to the detriment of Black lives.
Keeling’s formulations are well-anchored and meaningful but you’d require broad backgrounds in cinema, media and Black scholarship to grasp much of what’s presented in the reading.
Keeling introduces us to the concepts of “spatio-temporality” in relation to Queerness and “opacity” in relation to Afrofuturism, or as Keeling puts it, Black futures—(these terms are quite complex to concisely describe in a short review).
Queer Times Black Futures is endowed with various references to media formats such as albums, films, literary works & more. It also attends to the crude arithmetics of capitalism today and how capitalism continues to repurpose itself with futuristic languages i.e. “the imagination” to the detriment of Black lives.
Keeling’s formulations are well-anchored and meaningful but you’d require broad backgrounds in cinema, media and Black scholarship to grasp much of what’s presented in the reading.
Read
December 30, 2020What could Grace Jones, Herman Melville, Audre Lorde, and the Shell Oil Company possibly have to do with each other? In her book Queer Times, Black Futures, Kara Keeling marshals examples from each of the above (and so many more) to revel in the possibilities of afrofuturism and the inherent queerness of time. Keeling explains how black culture is antifragile – enhanced not damaged by interruption or disaster – to ground her freewheeling launch into the intergalactic possibilities of black futures. She draws on Jones for her complicated relation to racism, gender, and machinery; Melville for his iconic emblem of passive negation – Bartleby the Scrivener; Lorde for her continual (re)imagining of alternate presents; and the Shell Oil Company for a negative example of how imagining a future, even one of destruction, can make that future a reality. This is a complicated and dense work which remains persistently hopeful for a better future.⠀
February 6, 2024
A lot that is great here, but some of the chapters deal with so many objects, theorists, and anecdotes that it feels jumpy. Possibly a stylistic strategy but I’m noticing a lot of this in newer theory/cultural studies books and I’d love a little more time to sit with things rather than skimming or jumping around.
Read
February 22, 2023broke my brain a little
Read
September 18, 2025Preface, intorduction, chapter 5
October 27, 2023
Kara Keeling knows what's up. Her politics of refusal, reimaginings of temporality and spatiality, the ways in which all this Deleuzian goodness converges and manifests in radical reconsideration of race. I ate this book up and am now desperate for someone I know to read it. The final few chapters drag a bit, I could've lived with a smaller book and supplemental texts outside the book, I felt it got a bit tedious or repetitive but also that allowed the ideas to really hit me. Recommend to anyone interested in media-based philosophy and interdisciplinary theory
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews