Kara Keeling - Queer Times, Black Futures

SEXUAL CULTURES

General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyongo, and Joshua Chambers-Letson

Founding Editors: Jos Esteban Muoz and Ann Pellegrini

Titles in the series include:

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Samuel R. Delany

Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations

Phillip Brian Harper

In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies

Many Merck

Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America

Jos A. Quiroga

Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel

Gregory Forter

Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest

Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa A. Duggan

Black Gay Man: Essays

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion

Edited by Maria C. Sanchez and Linda Schlossberg

The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity

Paul Morrison

The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater

Edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla

Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malav and Martin F. Manalansan IV

Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance

Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini

Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture

Frances Ngron-Muntaner

Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era

Marlon Ross

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

J. Jack Halberstam

Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality

Dwight A. McBride

God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

Michael Cobb

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual

Robert Reid-Pharr

The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

Lzaro Lima

Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

Dana Luciano

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Jos Esteban Muoz

Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

Scott Herring

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

Darieck Scott

Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries

Karen Tongson

Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading

Martin Joseph Ponce

Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled

Michael Cobb

Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias

Eng-Beng Lim

Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law

Isaac West

The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture

Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride

Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism

Amber Jamilla Musser

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

Rachel C. Lee

Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men

Jane Ward

Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance

Uri McMillan

A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

Hiram Prez

Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality

Katherine Franke

The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM and Pornography

Ariane Cruz

Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible

Malik Gaines

A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain

Christina Crosby

The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia

Gayle Salamon

Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody

Melissa M. Wilcox

After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life

Joshua Chambers-Letson

Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance

Amber Jamilla Musser

Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life

Tavia Nyongo

Queer Times, Black Futures

Kara Keeling

For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org

Kara Keeling

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2019 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Keeling, Kara, 1971 author.

Title: Queer times, black futures / Kara Keeling.

Description: New York : New York University Press, [2019] | Series: Sexual cultures | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018026983| ISBN 9780814748329 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780814748336 (pbk : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: African American sexual minorities. | Queer theory. | African Americans in mass media.

Classification: LCC HQ76.27.A37 K44 2019 | DDC 306.76089/96073dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018026983

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Thinking thought usually amounts to withdrawing into a dimensionless place in which the idea of thought alone persists. But thought in reality spaces itself out into the world. It informs the imaginary of peoples, their varied poetics, which it then transforms, meaning, in them its risk becomes realized.

douard Glissant, Imaginary

We were never meant to survive; we become or we are unbecoming. We change. We are no longer who we were or who we would have been. When something happens differently than it has before, when something affects us, we reforge ourselves in response. Every now harbors chaos and, therefore, a capacity for change. When survival is posed as enduring as such, we miss how that task calls for its own undoing in time. None of us survives as such; indeed, perhaps, freedom requires we give way to other things. Now. And perhaps again.

If we were never meant to survive as such, what do we do with the time that remains, while we suffer, while we rejoice, while we exist within conditions not entirely of our own making, yet still open, currently defined by, but not simply confined by, flesh that dies and lives in its time? What survives? What do we become in that survival, which was perhaps never meant to be? What of us should we invest in it? This book takes seriously the generative proposition