Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness by Nicole R. Fleetwood (review)

The visually arresting nature of black individuals has been chronicled vividly in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and studies of Saartjie Baartman, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus. Nicole R. Fleetwood opens Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness with an examination of Spike Lee’s iconic film Do the Right Thing (1989). While Fleetwood calls into question the utility of iconicity in shaping fields of vision that humanize black subjects, she begins with Lee’s film because it “continues to loom in [her] conscious[ness] as a clear and visceral moment of being moved by black visuality” (3). Troubling Vision analyzes the way black culture producers use visuality and performance to render “black life . . . intelligible and valued, as well as consumable and disposable” (6). Through analysis of performance-based photography, documentary photography, drama, advertising, fashion, and digital media art, the book develops four concepts: troubling vision, non-iconicity, excess flesh, and the visible seam. Speaking to contemporary and ongoing issues in visual culture, media studies, performance studies, critical race theory, popular culture, and feminist studies, Troubling Vision demonstrates the lasting importance of black cultural workers actively participating in crafting the visual landscape.

The introduction of the book establishes the concept of “troubl[ing] vision” (6), a phenomenon that results from the ability of blackness to disrupt the visual field and thereby redirect the gaze. Engaging with the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, Judith Butler, and W. J. T. Mitchell, Fleetwood contends, “These works allow for a reformulation of blackness as emergent through its troubling presence and association with bodies and subjects marked as black in the field of vision” (8). The process of troubling vision slyly transforms a detrimental quality of blackness—the spectacle—into a positive attribute. While not all of the cultural workers examined in the text undercut associations of blackness with commodifiability, danger, or criminality, to name a few associations examined in the volume, they all trouble ready inscriptions of blackness and require the viewer to take a second look at what appears before their eyes.

In Chapter One, Troubling Vision demonstrates the concept of non-iconicity, examining the work and life of Charles “Teenie” Harris, also known as “One Shot.” The documentary photographer chronicled the residents of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Hill District as a photojournalist for the Pittsburgh Courier. As Fleetwood outlines at the end of the chapter, while Harris did photograph some celebrities, most of his archive is of local residents participating in quotidian activities. Considering that, as Fleetwood explains, the most well-known photographs of African Americans often feature a heroic individual figure such as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Malcolm X, Harris’s archive is significant because it captures images of everyday people, providing “an alternative visual index of black lived experience of the twentieth century” (37).

Moving from the often overlooked archive of black life and living exemplified in Harris’s photography, Fleetwood takes up three areas of inquiry central to race and visual studies: colorism, black female excessiveness, and black men in hiphop. Chapter Two examines two plays, Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck (1925) and Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman (2002). Vision operates in both plays as a source of subject formation and knowledge production. The chapter concludes that colorism as a system “produces its own failure” (76), creating slippages in the process of racial differentiation. Given the undercutting logics of colorism, the dark-skinned protagonists of both plays nevertheless must suffer the psychic consequences of intraracism and abjection.

Chapter Three similarly explores a seemingly abject figure in American culture, the excessive black woman and her unwieldy body. The chapter considers works by visual artists Renée Cox and Ayanah Moor, conceptual artist Tracey Rose, and musical artists Janet Jackson and Lil’ Kim. Mixing so-called high art and popular forms, the chapter calls into question the function of black women producing the visual economies of excess and the implications of that production...