Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness

by Nicole R. Fleetwood

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.

Genres: Art History, Nonfiction, Race, Photography, Research, Theory, Feminism

296 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2010

About the author

Nicole R. Fleetwood is Professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University. Her work on art and mass incarceration has been featured at the Aperture Foundation and the Zimmerli Museum of Art, and her exhibitions have been praised by the New York Times, The Nation, the Village Voice, and the New Yorker. She is the uthor of On Racial Icons and the prizewinning Troubling Vision.

Reviews

[Tia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in a very readable style, Fleetwood’s book makes crucial interventions into questions of the image and circulations of performance vis-a-vis Black studies and cultural studies. The introduction and first chapter stand out for their orginality and deft toggling between examples/close readings, field-mapping, and argumentation; however, the remaining chapters feel much less argumentative and often more like summary, bogged down by constant references to/quotation of other scholars that are not well-integrated and stifle Fleetwood’s own argument (sometimes it seems like she is just synthesizing or repeating the folks she cites?). Also a bit puzzled by the very deliberate absences in the Coda on Michael Jackson, which like a lot of these readings, feels overly reliant on the politics of reclamation and reappropriation, concepts that are perhaps idealized or not sufficiently developed.

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I found the premise of the Fleetwood's study that is studying when Black iconicity in society fails, I did not find Fleetwood's execution (methods and writing) to be supportive of this premise. Fleetwood structures the chapters in the book to conclude with the failure of black iconicity, rather than starting off with them. For example, I agree with her argument on excessive flesh, as it pertains to Black women, is, at time a radical performance of alterity through an analysis of Lil' Kim, but instead of continuing to read through Lil' Kim's transformational work via music video and plastic surgery, Fleetwood ends her chapter musing what that analysis would be. The opportunity for further exploration is how many of her chapters end, thus the book is another example of studying what Black iconicity looks like in society, which goes against what she sets out to accomplish in the introduction of her book. Additionally, I found that Fleetwood's use of performance theory didn't really support her argument. Fleetwood's use of visuality and visual studies, however, was incredibly insightful and were the strongest parts of her argument.

[Elijah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fleetwood sets up her arguments well. Solid evidence and counter balancing with other authors to achieve the many points throughout her text. Especially fond of chapters two, three, and four. Learned a lot through the work though about Black art and cultural history.

And her bibliography and notes are really informative. Lol. Nerd alert!

[Miguel Fernandez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fleetwood's writing is so strong---really compelling look at how Blackness troubles the colonial visual gaze, utilizing the works of remarkable artists to evidence her claims and examinations.

[Prema · Rating 4 out of 5]

The chapters that focused on female artists or explored gender at all were the most compelling to me. The MJ Coda confused me and felt like an uncomfortable endnote, especially after Fleetwood spoke against iconicity as a central argument in Troubling Vision. Maybe I’m just not getting it though.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fleetwood investigates the ways in which the visuality of blackness (by which she means, specifically, blackness as something seen) can (but, apparently, does not always) trouble expectations/standard narratives of race. Certain chapters were compelling, above all her discussion of the non-iconic photographs of Charles "Teenie" Harris and the artwork of Fatimah Tuggar. The chapters were quite modular, though, and it was at times hard to follow the connections Fleetwood gestures towards.

[CJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicole Fleetwood offers a brilliant analysis on both the familiar and disruptive presence of Blackness in visual and performance art, with an emphasis on colorism and hypervisibility of Black female bodies. The introduction is a bit of an academic explosion, but the work as a whole is a must-read for all artists... and non-artists.

[Mark Middleton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good book, very interesting. More to added.

[Mills College Library]

305.89607 F595 2011