Directory Profile
Kara Keeling
Chair, Cinema & Media Studies
Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences
Research areas: Afrofuturisms and Radical Imaginations, Black and Queer Cultural Politics, Sound and Music Studies, Digital Media
Affiliated Divisions:
Division of Cinema & Media Studies
Email: kkeeling@cinema.usc.edu
Kara Keeling's most recent monograph, Queer Times, Black Futures, was published in 2019 by New York University Press. It considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism by exploring how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. Keeling’s first book, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007), explores the role of cinematic images in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic conceptions of the world and interrogates the complex relationships between cinematic visibility, minority politics, and the labor required to create and maintain alternative organizations of social life. Keeling is co-editor (with Josh Kun) of Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies, a collection of writings about sound and American Studies and (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead entitled European Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing. Keeling’s essays have appeared in the journals GLQ, The Black Scholar, Women and Performance, and elsewhere.
- "LOOKING FOR M- Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility and the Poetry from the Future" GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
- "1 = ANOTHER: DIGITAL IDENTITY POLITICS" Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization. Eds. Roderick A. Ferguson and Grace Kyungwon Hong. Duke University Press, 2011.
- "'A HOMEGROWN REVOLUTIONARY'?; Tupac Shakur and the legacy of the Black Panther Party" The Black Scholar
Racist Traces and Other Writings: European Pedigrees/African Contagions (co- editor, Palgrave-MacMillan, 2003)
The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007)
Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies (co-editor, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012)
Queer Times, Black Futures (New York University Press, 2019)
