The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense Book

Kara Keeling's The Witch's Flight draws from and synthesizes the work of Deluze, Fanon, Spivak, and Gramsci to examine popular cinematic representations of Blackness. In exploring the cinematic'both in terms of popular film and in terms of the cinematic as applied to spectacular recorded performances and appearances, like the filmed Black Panther Party protests against the Milford Act'Keeling both draws out the "common sense" narratives being (re)produced within these films and examines how these cinematic representations offer alternative formations of "common sense" in some cases, and fugitive counternarratives in other cases. These fugitive readings ultimately find their subject in the figure of the Black femme, whose Black femme function "posits to a radical Elsewhere that is 'outside homogenous space and time' and that 'does not belong to the order of the invisible'" (137).

Ultimately, Keeling's analysis of the cinematic production of common sense, and the fugitive and unaccounted-for modes of alternative readings that resist liberal formations of chronological time'most embodied in the figure of the black femme'make visible the limits of the hegemonic project. Or, as Keeling writes: "…the black femme currently is a reminder that the set of what appears is never perfectly closed and that something different might appear therein at any instant whatever" (143).