Analysis Of Troubling Vision

Troubling Vision (2011) is a key text for studying blackness and black identity from the point of view of visual studies. I am compelled by Fleetwood’s analysis of the double bind of blackness as something that saturates the field of vision, “troubling it” while also remaining complicit to, and thus reproducing, normative framings of racial difference. At the core of her analysis is the critique of America’s insistent cultural and visual “investment in black iconicity” (11), which denies visibility to blacks as “ethical and enfleshed subjects” (16). The spectacularization of blackness entails that the image becomes iconic, “function[ing] as an abstraction, as decontextualized evidence of a historical narrative that is constrained by normative public discourse” (11). Troubling Vision critically addresses the presence of the black body as “commodity fetish” in American visual culture, mapping alternative paths of black visuality (112).

The concern with the commodification and reproducibility of blackness makes her exploration of this specific instance of black American culture a core reference of my examination of African vernacular dress as a marketable signifier of “cool” and