Troubling vision [electronic resource] : performance, visuality, and blackness / Nicole R. Fleetwood.

9780226253053 (electronic book)
9780226253022
0226253023
9780226253039
0226253031

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2011.

English

1 online resource (xx, 276 p.) : ill.

E185.625 .F544 2011eb

Troubling Vision addresses American cultures 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.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Access limited to authorized users.

Description based on print version record.

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