The Witch’s Flight

The Witch’s Flight
Kara Keeling
Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822340259
Non-Fiction, Entertainment
Reviewed by Jean Roberta

At first glance, this scholarly analysis of the impact of cinema and television on “common sense” (commonly accepted but not necessarily sensible) images of “blacks” and “women” within a racist, sexist, homophobic, postcolonial capitalist culture looks like a summary of earlier theories. Keeling draws especially on Gilles Deleuze’s conception of “the cinematic” as a means of creating--not simply reflecting--social reality. Along the way, she refers to the theories of Franz Fanon, Angela Davis, Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci. Finding Keeling’s own thesis amongst all the references to her intellectual forebears requires some effort.
The effort is worthwhile. Keeling’s analysis of the masculine, widely televised image of Black Panthers entering the halls of government in Sacramento, California, with guns in 1967 to protest a proposed new law is worth the price of the book in itself. She explains why a surprisingly high percentage of women joined the Black Panther Party in the wake of those shocking images, a departure from a tradition of stereotyped American images of “blacks” based in slavery. She explains why the guerilla-fighter image created by leather jackets, berets and guns not only referred to liberation fighters in other parts of the world but counteracted an older “feminine” image of black men and women as passive, irrational, identified solely with the physical, and existing to be acted upon.
In a revision of retrospective feminist analyses of 1960s notions of “Black Power,” Keeling explains that in its early days, that concept, never separated from visual representation, seemed to be a claiming of the role of “citizen” (traditionally white, male and bourgeois) by those who had been excluded from it. Keeling also explains how quickly the concept/image of “the black man” as non-gender specific became specifically male and sexist, both within the Black Panther Party and more widely in African-American culture. She also shows how a rigid and exclusive conception of “man” inevitably led to the policing of gender norms and hostility to “bulldaggers” (women thought to be too masculine and in sexual competition with males) as well as “fags” (men perceived as embodiments of feminine powerlessness).
Keeling shows how the direct emergence of “blaxploitation” films from the new image of “blacks with guns” not only rescued the Hollywood film industry from a financial crisis but created the viewer-demographic it was trying to reach. She explains:
“Melvin van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song (1970) is credited with having established that there is a large, black teenage audience for films that feature a ‘macho black hero.’ Sweet Sweetback generally is recognized as the film that proved the strength of the black box office to Hollywood, thereby ushering in a roughly five-year period of cheaply made feature films with predominately [sic] black casts.”
Keeling, an Assistant Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Art and of African American Studies in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, goes on to trace the long-term cultural aftermath of events in the 1960s in terms of popular visual images and corresponding “sheets of history” (perceptions/conceptions of the history of Americans of African descent) through popular films. Keeling’s argument is sweeping but persuasive: that the politics and culture of African-Americans since the beginning of the 20th century are inseparable from the development of the movie industry and then television.
This book is not easy to grasp in one sitting, but it rewards serious attention. Individual chapters can be read on their own. One of them, “’Ghetto Heaven’: Set It Off and the Valorization of Black Lesbian Butch-Femme” was originally published in The Black Scholar. (For readers not familiar with Set It Off, a 1996 film about four black women who rob a bank, reading this book could serve as a reason to rent the film.)
The Witch’s Flight is part of a scholarly series, Perverse Modernities, edited by Judith Halberstam and Lisa Lowe. Readers who are specifically interested in Keeling’s body of work can also seek out Racist Traces and Other Writings: European Pedigrees/African Contagions, which she co-edited with James A. Snead. For anyone interested in cultural analysis, Keeling’s approach is ultimately satisfying. Ironically, she digs below visual “reality” in a way which is scrupulous, logical and far from glib.