In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value by Alessandra Raengo
  • Douglas C. MacLeod Jr. (bio)
Raengo, Alessandra. On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College P, 2013.

I have been reviewing books for close to ten years, and within that time span I have read very difficult and highly sophisticated texts; so when I started On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value written by Alessandra Raengo, I prepared myself for yet another one. I knew that the text, published by Dartmouth College Press, was not going to be an easy one, both in language and in content, because of the introductory paragraphs. I recognized that I had to sift through the post-modernist prose to get at the heart of what this book is trying to prove, to find out what Raengo’s thesis is as it pertains to how we see the African American image in various forms of mass-mediated communication. It took me weeks to read the entire work and this is what I came up with: I am not completely sure what the thesis is, and that is very much because of Raengo’s compulsive need to complicate, and almost mask, the issue with impossible verbiage and a barrage of Derridian/Foucaultian/Benjaminian high theory. I don’t generally do this in reviews (I very much attempt to stay neutral as a rule), but I feel it almost necessary to provide this public service announcement for those writing academic texts: Please stop! As a reader, I want to understand the content and the context in clear and concise ways, because the argument gets lost and becomes ineffective otherwise. Raengo, in other words, has so much potential to provide readers with a text that could be game-changing; instead, she loses her grip on the importance of the analysis because of her deep immersion into the daunting world of old-school literary and critical theory. There is no doubt that it has its place and if used sporadically this sort of language can have a deep impact on the reader; but if used in excess, it could be detrimental to the well-being of the text, which is certainly the case in this instance.

As mentioned above, Raengo’s introductory content exemplifies how she excessively uses theoretical terminology, although it is slightly more suppressed because she needs the reader to at least attempt to know what direction she is going. She begins her work by deconstructing Glenn Lignon’s 1998 Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Black Features / Self-Portrait Exaggerating My White Features, where she makes the claim that “seeing is always seeing as” as well as “a chasm between, among other things, identity and identical, same and double, different and equal” (1); which leads her to beg the question: Is Lignon’s photograph racial? (To see this photograph, one can go to <http://sites.duke.edu/vms590s_01_f2012/2012/11/12/glenn-ligon-self-portrait/>). It is here where it becomes slightly more convoluted, in that Raengo claims that “race acts as a form of the articulation of the visual—a template, an epistemology, a map, an affect, a gestalt, a medium—as W. J. T. Mitchell has most recently argued, or as Toni Morrison’s image suggests, as a fishbowl,” and that she is interested in “exploring the way in which the ‘medium-being’ of race provides an ontology of the image that our supposed post-medium and post-ontology moment might have put under erasure, but is still unable to undermine” (3). So, what is the “ontology of the image?” André Bazin (as translated by Hugh Gray) is integral in understanding this terminology:

Today the making of images no longer shares an anthropocentric, utilitarian purpose. It is no longer a question of survival after death, but of a larger concept, the creation of an ideal world in the likeness [End Page 717] of the real, with its own temporal destiny … If the history of the plastic arts is less a matter of their aesthetic than their psychology then it will be seen to be essentially the story of resemblance, or if you...

pdf

Share