In A Quare Time and Place: On the Politics of Blaxploitation-Cinema and Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism

In a Quare Time and Place is the title of the upcoming book by queer theorist and curator Tim Stüttgen (Post / Porn / Politics). Focusing on the trajectory of slavery in the US to develop a queer of color-perspective based on Frantz Fanon, Stüttgen follows discourses and cinemas of black mobility and temporality.

Between intersectionality and Deleuzian discourses on heterogeneity, Stüttgen develops the “Black Movement Image” in interaction with close readings of the first Afro-American cinema, Blaxploitation. Complicating the intersection of race, sex and gender, Stüttgen develops the notion of Quareness—with the “a” of the black in the queer and goes beyond humanist discourses following Afrofuturism and the Cosmic Sonic Philosophy of Sun Ra. Focusing on a close reading of Ra’s most popular filmic performance, Space is the Place (US, John Coney, 1974), the concepts of a quare time and a radically black “Time Image” are elaborated through a continuum of past traumas and future utopias. The book is presented in interaction with several film clips and musical bits for an exclusive interdisciplinary reading.