Queer Times, Black Futures

ABSTRACT

"2 Kara Keeling's effort echoes Lordc's excavation of deep-earth Black wisdom that, as the late poet writes, becomes a "jewel in . . . open light" and that might service what historian Robin Kelley has termed freedom dreams-"the dream of a new world" entertained and envisioned by activists and artists that might form the "catalyst for . . . political engagement" in our time.3 Keeling enhances Kelley's principle by considering Nassim Nicholas Taleb's trope of the "Black Swan event," which is "characterized by 'a combination of low predictability and large impact'" and manifests as reliance upon what is known rather than the inevitable eruptions of the unknown.4 Keeling leverages Taleb's principle to explain how the long history of revolutions can still be narrated as surprises within the colonial mindset. "5 Freedom dreams are also, as Keeling demonstrates in her book, expressed in such layered texts as Grace Jones's video for "Corporate Cannibal" as well as C. L. R. James's 1953 study Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways.6 This orientation toward a more just future to come-one that "requires (recreation and imagination"-is recognized as "what Frantz Fanon referred to as a 'real leap.' "' Keeling's interest in these potentialities, "(re)turns," and "the (im)possible" is constructed as anticapital;the resources she identifies are for the enactment of a sustainable, ethical world that is not just divested from but radically un-invested in property, accumulation, and the injustices that follow investment in those capitalist, settler-colonial fictions.8 If poetry resists the lure of rendering the felt into material, so too does it effectively transmit queer dreams of a radical future because "Ipjoetry is a way of entering the unknown and carrying back the impossible. "9 Keeling's book resonates with Stephen Best's 2018 monograph, None Like Us Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life, in their shared concern about the character of Black study and the utopianism of queer thought.10 But whereas Best is invested in critiquing the Black history-bound subject of Afropessimism and the queer utopian subject who is alienated from an insistence upon a future bound up with narratives of reproduction, Keeling's approach seems much more expansive in its characterization of Black and queer radicalism. Queer Times, Black Futures explores the philosophical principle of the "'Black Swan' event"-that which "appears to be a random, unpredictable, outlier," otherwise called the unthinkable-through and against another of Taleb's books, Antifragile Things That Gain from Disorder.b In so doing, it offers that what is radical, unpredictable, and capable of surviving the disasters of late capitalism and environmental catastrophe is identifiable (though not knowable) as Black and queer thought.