Troubling Vision
Performance, Visuality, and Blackness
Troubling Vision addresses American culture’s fixation on black visibility, exploring how blackness is persistently seen as a problem in public culture and even in black scholarship that challenges racist discourse. Through trenchant analysis, Nicole R. Fleetwood reorients the problem of black visibility by turning attention to what it means to see blackness and to the performative codes that reinforce, resignify, and disrupt its meaning. Working across visual theory and performance studies, Fleetwood asks, How is the black body visualized as both familiar and disruptive? How might we investigate the black body as a troubling presence to the scopic regimes that define it as such? How is value assessed based on visible blackness?
Fleetwood documents multiple forms of engagement with the visual, even as she meticulously underscores how the terms of engagement change in various performative contexts. Examining a range of practices from the documentary photography of Charles “Teenie” Harris to the “excess flesh” performances of black female artists and pop stars to the media art of Fatimah Tuggar to the iconicity of Michael Jackson, Fleetwood reveals and reconfigures the mechanics, codes, and metaphors of blackness in visual culture.
“Troubling Vision contributes vitally to new work in visual and performance studies as well as black popular culture. The book’s sophisticated renderings of blackness reveal the significance of seeing in feminist media, photographs, and fashion from the Harlem Renaissance to Michael Jackson. A fascinating study!”—Jennifer Brody, Duke University
“What kind of fetish is the black body, and how do traditional logics of racial visibility reproduce its ‘troubling’ presence across representational genres and pop cultural forms? Nicole Fleetwood has crafted a truly powerful and compellingly interdisciplinary answer to those interconnected questions, recalibrating and superseding age-old debates about the politics and poetics of visual culture. Troubling Vision demonstrates how visual and other artists—photographers and playwrights, performance artists and pop singers—confound the tropes of pathology that have long prefigured and overdetermined views of blackness as conspicuous difference. This very readable and theoretically sophisticated book focuses on some of the ways in which black artists resist the too-easy lure of self-evident iconicity, leaving subtle and not so subtle traces of the hard work that debunking racist stereotypes entails. Fleetwood’s offering is smart, at times quite personal, even moving, and a must-read for scholars working at the nexus of race and performativity, African American studies, and visual theory.”--John L. Jackson Jr., University of Pennsylvania
Preface
Acknowledgments
ONE / “One Shot”: Charles “Teenie” Harris and the Photographic Practice of Non-Iconicity
TWO / Her Own Spook: Colorism, Vision, and the Dark Female Body
THREE / Excess Flesh: Black Women Performing Hypervisibility
FOUR / “I am King”: Hip-Hop Culture, Fashion Advertising, and the Black Male Body
FIVE / Visible Seams: The Media Art of Fatimah Tuggar
CODA / The Icon Is Dead: Mourning Michael Jackson
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Art: American Art
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
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