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

Nicole Fleetwood's Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness is an interdisciplinary study that engages theories of race, visual culture, and feminism, as well as performance studies, in order to interrogate how blackness is knowable through a visible, performing subject. Fleetwood argues that the affective power of black bodies within contemporary visual discourse prompts spectators to regard blackness as a problem—the black body is always troubling the dominant visual field. She investigates the disruptive power of blackness in a range of cultural texts and practices, including documentary photography, plays by black women, visual art by black women, the performances of pop stars, advertising, and video. Through her analysis, she seeks to understand how visual discourse produces blackness and how it interpellates spectators to regard it as a problem. Drawing from Judith Butler's theory of performativity, Fleetwood posits the visual field as a space where seeing race is a "doing." She asserts that blackness is "manifested through a deliberate performance of visibility that begs us to consider the constructed nature of visuality" and highlights the myriad ways in which blackness is assigned to bodies, ideas, aesthetic practices, and even material items (20).

In her first chapter, Fleetwood develops the idea of non-iconicity, which allows her to establish blackness as a strategy of negation. She applies this theory to the mid-twentieth-century photographs of Charles "Teenie" Harris, whose work in the Hill District of Pittsburgh serves as a counterpoint to iconic images of the civil rights movement. Fleetwood critiques dominant images of the movement, such as the memorable (staged) photographic still of Rosa Parks on the Montgomery bus in 1956, which establishes a historical narrative of blackness that perpetuates a white hegemonic vision of black subjugation. Harris's body of photographic work, in contrast, troubles such prescriptions by chronicling everyday life within a dynamic black community. His photos, such as "Portrait of man wearing light colored shirt with pack of cigarettes in front pocket, standing in front of chain link fence, 1950-65," capture ordinary people in unremarkable moments of daily life, imbuing them with a sense of agency. Fleetwood thus reads the non-iconicity of Harris's work, representing black subjects typically excluded from public memory, as interventionist.

Chapters 2 and 3 are particularly resonant for theatre scholars. Taking Zora Neale Hurston's Color Struck (1926) and Dael Orlandersmith's Yellowman (2002) as her case studies in the second chapter, Fleetwood unpacks the ways in which both playwrights deploy "character type and narrative structure to dramatize the psychic and affective domains of colorism" (72). As Fleetwood explains, "colorism" is a system in which blackness is measured on a hierarchical scale where the "excess" of a dark-skinned body renders one, especially a black woman, as depicted in these two plays, both invisible and hypervisible—a figure of abjection, both in normative white culture and in the black community. Because colorism privileges vision as a mode of detecting difference, it not only subjects black bodies to the trauma of its visual regime, but also creates anxiety for those who fail to detect difference. As Fleetwood shows, the colorism depicted in both plays reveals how performing subjects enact difference through looking and decoding.

Moving fluidly among the realms of high art, mass culture, and black popular culture, the third chapter extends this analysis of the black woman's body as aberrant image into a consideration of black female artists who strategically use their bodies to create images of excess in order to critique racialized and gendered structures within the visual field. While "the black female body is always troubling to [the] dominant visual culture," Fleetwood maintains, "its troubling presence can [also] work productively" (113). Her subjects range from Renee Cox's painting Yo Mama's Last Supper (1996), which caused a furor when it was displayed at the Brooklyn Museum, to Janet Jackson's scandalous performance at the Super Bowl in 2004. As she points out, both artists deployed the excess of black female visibility—an...