![]() ![]() The politics of iconization and the value of blackness as a source of capital are addressed in the chapter entitled “‘I am King’: Hip-Hop Culture, Fashion Advertising, and the Black Male Body.” Here, Fleetwood analyzes the rise of the hip-hop fashion industry in the 1990s, propelled by the activities of moguls the likes of Russell Simmons, Sean Combs, and Jay-Z, as a manifestation of “the marketing of youthful and racialized alterity as a stylized and reproducible commodity” (176). ![]() 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 spectacularization of blackness entails that the image becomes iconic, “function as an abstraction, as decontextualized evidence of a historical narrative that is constrained by normative public discourse” (11). 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). 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. Troubling Vision (2011) is a key text for studying blackness and black identity from the point of view of visual studies. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |