Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (review)

"Blackness troubles vision in Western discourse" (6). So begins, and ultimately concludes, Nicole Fleetwood's compelling and ruggedly interdisciplinary new study, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. Drawing on the protocols of visual and performance studies as well as critical race theory, Fleetwood considers the ways in which blackness is enacted "as a problem, as perplexing, as troubling to the dominant visual field" (7). The emphasis here is on production rather than product, that is, how artists across media—from documentary photography to theatre, from performance art to hip-hop videos and print advertising—visualize the black body in ways that not only reveal the conditions of normative scopic regimes, but also the spectatorial labor of how we see, and therefore assign meaning to, blackness. Understanding the visual sphere itself as a "performative field where seeing race is not a transparent act" but a "doing" (7), Fleetwood develops a new critical vocabulary to conceptualize the relation between racial subjectivity and the "constructed nature of visuality" (20). The development of three analytical concepts in particular—namely, non- iconicity, excess flesh, and the visible seam—constitutes the project's most original offering and promises to make Troubling Vision a vital, lasting contribution to the field.

Fleetwood defines non-iconicity as an interventionist strategy that destabilizes the icon's signification of teleological, and thus occlusive, grand narratives of civic, social, and political progress. She writes, "Non-iconicity is an aesthetic and theoretical position that lessens the weight placed on the black visual to do so much. It is a movement away from the singularity and significance placed on instantiations of blackness to resolve that which cannot be resolved" (9). This position, therefore, complements and frequently challenges prevailing meanings that inhere within iconic signs, symbols, and images of "the black subject whose struggles for equality represent the possibilities of American democracy" (33). Fleetwood's case study, here, is the photography of Charles "Teenie" Harris. His practice of non-iconicity complicates the iconic images of the civil rights movement, such as the well-known, yet staged, photograph of Rosa Parks sitting in front a white man on a bus. Fleetwood shows how his practice was one of photography as performance, that it was "not so much about the image photographed but the act of photographing subjects in his local environment" (49). Harris's work—nearly 80,000 negatives of scenes he shot from the 1930s through the 1970s for the black newspaper, Pittsburgh Courier, and in his own studio practice—documents the quotidian heterogeneity of black life, telling a more grounded story of black struggle than that which the dominant visual archive of the civil rights movement signifies. Thus the negatives—a great number of which Harris left unlabeled, thereby doubly affirming their non-iconicity—unsettle "blackness as a singular totalizing narrative but [entertain] the notion of play, incompleteness, and resistance to the archive as [a] primary source for tapping into the historical evidence of black everyday experience" (60).

Like photographic non-iconicity, black feminist performances and performatives of "excess flesh" subvert racial and gender codes that configure normative visual production. Fleetwood writes that excess flesh is "an enactment of the gaze that does not necessarily attempt to heal or redress the naked, exploited, denigrated black female body tethered to the black imago but understands the function of this figuration in dominant visual culture. This productive look lays bare the symbols and meanings of this weighted figure" (111). She most fully theorizes this concept in her analysis of the portraiture of visual artists Renee Cox, Tracey Rose, and Ayanah Moor, as well as the music and videos of hip-hop artist Lil' Kim. In their work, these cultural producers decidedly call attention to the visual configurations that have worked to negate and devalue black female subjectivity. In addition to its pedagogical function, excess flesh, "while not necessarily resistant, can be productive in conceiving of an identificatory possibility" for black women...