"There is a special alchemy at work in this wonderful project that transforms painstaking research and original theoretical insight into a superb understanding of the cinematic's deeply cathected relation to blackness, gender, and sexuality. Kara Keeling watches, reads, and stitches together a tapestry that teaches us how to re-read and re-think what we thought we knew already of visual culture, of the peculiarities of our social order's self-imagination, and of the survival of black femme desire."--Wahneema Lubiano, editor of "The House that Race Built"

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Another Litany for Survival 1
1. The Image of Common Sense 11
2. In the Interval 27
3. “In Order to Move Forward”: Common-Sense Black Nationalism and Haile Gerima’s Sankofa 45
4. “We’ll Just Have to Get Guns and Be Men”: The Cinematic Appearance of Black Revolutionary Women 68
5. “A Black Belt in Bar Stool”: Blaxploitation, Surplus, and The L Word 95
6. “What’s Up With That? She Don’t Talk?”: Set It Off’s Black Lesbian Butch-Femme 118
7. Reflections on the Black Femme’s Role in the [Re]production of Cinematic Reality: The Case of Eve’s Bayou 138
Notes 159
Bibliography 195
Index 203