Reviewed by Evelyn Hartogh

Poetic to the point of abstraction at times, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, conveys in style what it brings forth in theory. The Witch's Flight argues that the representation of the Afro-American butch (or femme) lesbian appears more in absence, and in opposition to the predominant representation of images of race, gender and sexuality that appear on film and television. In her study of the televised appearances of the Black Panthers in the 1960s, the films Sankofa (1993), Set It Off (1996), Eve’s Bayou (1997), the 1970s blaxploitation films of Pam Grier, and the television lesbian soap opera The L Word, (2004-2008), Keeling demonstrates that the image of the black femme is one that exists off-screen, out of the frame, and out of view, as it were. The invisible black femme becomes an important reference point that the characters onscreen distance themselves from, and by their very demarcations of ‘what they are not’, they define the gaps and absences in which the black femme becomes incarnated. The black femme exists, Keeling argues, by the public ostracism of her body, and even exorcism of her ghost’s inevitable haunting.

The Witch's Flight is reminiscent of poetic philosophy such as of Helene Cixous’s Laugh of Medusa and Luce Irigary’s The Sex Which is Not One. Keeling’s rhythmic, repetitive style, her re-invention of language, and therefore ways of understanding the world, and her focus on discerning the shadow images of the marginalised, mirror continental feminist philosophers such as Cixous and Irigary. However, while Keeling draws on the same Marxist and Existential philosophies that influenced Cixous and Irigary, and even refers to Deleuze, whose work was influenced by such continental feminist philosophers, she makes no reference to them at all.

Since Keeling investigates what is unseen, her discussions must begin with what is seen, thus she uncovers the ways in which black masculinity is constructed via a rejection of homosexuality and a subjugation of women to the role of silent accessory. Even the portrayal of a black lesbian in Set It Off involves the character placed in a role that mirrors the men around her, in that she too has a quiet femme chick just like the other macho gangsters.

Not only is the black femme unseen, Keeling argues, but also she must compete with the multiple layers of slave and/or urban criminal images of Afro-Americans, which, even when made absent themselves, such as in Eve’s Bayou, are so ever-present in the minds of viewers that they are immediately evoked by any black appearance on film. Keeling uses the term ‘affected’ to describe how any representation of an Afro-American will be read in the emotional context of the history of slavery and the civil rights movement. Although Eve’s Bayou centres on a rural middle-class African American family it remains embedded, and indebted, to the slavery ‘past’ of the story. The long shadow of slavery means that the characters ‘respectability’, mirroring images of whiteness, is constantly threatened by the taint of criminality inherent in urban modernisation.

Sankofa deeply emphasises the weight of the past with its story of an Afro-American model who, in the middle of a fashion photo shoot for a white photographer, travels back in time to the pre-abolition days of plantations and slavery. The traumatic not-so-distant past of dehumanisation, rape and torture, which were a daily part of the life of slaves, has such deep resonance in Sankofa that it overwhelms even the most successful of a modern black femme, and it becomes not her past, but her present.

The blaxploitaion films of Pam Grier, while set in the contemporary 1970s in which they were made, also demonstrate the large shadow cast by slavery, in the ways in which Grier’s characters must frequently escape imprisonment, kidnapping and deprivation of liberty. Created during the era of the American Civil Rights movement, blaxploitation films sought to empower black audiences while at the same time offer a more commercially viable image of black power. Pam Grier, although wonderfully tough, assertive and well-worth admiring, was certainly much less threatening than the real-life, gun-toting, civil rights activists the Black Panthers.

Even in the twenty-first century lesbian soap opera The L Word, Keeling find echoes of images of slavery, urban criminality, middle-class aspirations of whiteness, and blaxploitation cinema itself, competing with the images of politically conservative, respectable, family orientated, upper-middle class lesbians the show wants to portray. Pam Grier plays a disappointingly passive, watered down version of her action heroines of the 1970s, and stands out as the sole heterosexual main character in the ensemble of ‘gay’ women.

In every case that Keeling seeks to find an image of the black femme, she only discovers the traces left by her departure. Even in films that attempt to re-invent stereotypical images of race and gender, the emphasis remains in valorising masculine strength, feminine vulnerability, master-slave relationships, and glamorising guns and violence. The black femme becomes like the Halloween icon of the black silhouette of the witch on a broomstick flying across the moon, she is mythic and fantastical, incredibly powerful, in transit rather than stable, and comfortable with all that is fearful, unknown, and ostracised. In The Witch's Flight Keeling shows that this image of the fearful unknown is utilised as a base for making the male, the straight and the capitalist seem normal and safe. The Black Femme, like the witch, is everything that we are told not to be, but try as we might to distance her from representation, she appears in stark relief on a background of whiteness.


The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense
(2007)

by Kara Keeling
Duke University Press
ISBN: 13 978-0-8223-4025-6
224pp US$22.95