Refuse normative claims of debate as a game in favor of radical imagination that thrives in the state of being unpredictable. The articulation of new social connections where they are deemed as “unexpected” reconfigures spaces as sites for sociality that hold politically generative potential against capitalist knowability.

Keeling’s Queer Times, Black Futures has a similar investment in discovering how capitalism uses speculation as a mechanism and how Black and queer speculation can disrupt those futures. Keeling’s “queer times” refers to the result of applying Glissant’s strategy of opacity to certain cinematic images. Doing so, Keeling argues, “enhances the queer temporalities within the cinematic; it stalls (however momentarily) recognition of those images according to existing systems of evaluation and commensuration. An insistence on opacity gives queer time for the conceptions for the world is sedimented or . . . accumulated within existing relations to appear now” (32). For Keeling, Black futures is an antifragile investment in the errant, the irrational, and the unpredictable, made by a political imagination that posits radical socioeconomic and geopolitical transformations.

The question of Black speculation takes center stage in Queer Times, Black Futures. Keeling begins with the market-driven speculations of capitalism and makes an important observation about the co-option of interdisciplinarity by capital, which seeks to reproduce itself in increasingly new fields, times, and locations. Queer time and its unpredictability and unknowability, Keeling argues, along with the Black radical imagination and the kinds of opacity it ushers in (35), makes it a threat to the kinds of futures capital needs to imagine in order to reproduce itself. Throughout the book, Keeling further maintains a sustained engagement with Herman Melville’s Bartleby (1853) as a figure of opacity and futures past (49). Keeling’s argument extends Deleuze’s conclusions in his discussion of “Bartleby” and Melville’s America to consider Bartleby’s relationship to the “New World.” Bartleby’s engagement with the politics of refusal offers us a way to understand Bartleby as a figure who “carries a potential to de-create the American project” (186).

Queer Times, Black Futures offers its own “de-creation” of the American project through keen critical insight on the strategies of Black speculative fiction and Afrofuturism. Keeling’s analysis of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place and Octavia Butler’s Parables series makes a case for Afrofuturist and Black speculative thought to articulate new organizations of space and time that is aware of the “inactive potentials within ‘the Human’s’ governing structures” (74). For example, Keeling demonstrates how Sun Ra’s formulation “It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?” and “time has officially ended,” like Glissant’s Caribbean, presents futurity as fact by way of an apocalypse or catastrophe that requires beginning with no past. This model of futurity, according to Keeling, points to the bifurcations and temporalities that characterize Western modernity. For Keeling, these Black futures open up ways to connect various spacetimes to the contexts of “those whose existence is objecthood and thingness” and signal new possibilities for theory and ethics that might bring about a just world (79). Keeling’s discussion suggests that there is something generative that can come out of critical theories that argue for the nonexistence or social death of the Black subject. Butler and Sun Ra are able to take up the nonhuman, the socially dead, and the perpetual afterlife of slavery in their work through metaphor and in doing so carry the path to an alternative.