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dillarhonda's review against another edition
What 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.⠀
soafricane's review against another edition
3.0
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.
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