[ebooks] Artistic Citizenship: A Public Voice for the Arts by From Routledge at Arts-Photography

Description

Troubling Vision addresses American culturersquo;s 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 ldquo;Teenierdquo; Harris to the ldquo;excess fleshrdquo; 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.ldquo;Troubling Vision is a path-breaking book that examines the problem of seeing blacknessmdash;the simultaneous hyper-visibility and invisibility of African Americansmdash;in US visual culture in the last half century. Weaving together critical modes and methodologies from performance studies; art history; critical race studies; visual culture analysis; and gender theory; Fleetwood expands Du Boisrsquo;s idea of double vision into a broad questioning of whether lsquo;representation itself will resolve the problem of the black body in the field of vision.rsquo; With skilled attention to historical contexts; documentary practices; and media forms; she takes up the works of a broad variety of cultural producers; from photographers and playwrights to musicians and visual artists and examines black spectatorship as well as black spectacle. In chapters on the trope of lsquo;non-iconicityrsquo; in the photographs of Charles (Teenie) Harris; the lsquo;visible seamsrsquo; in the digital images of the artist Fatimah Tuggar; and a coda on the un-dead Michael Jackson; Fleetwoods close analyses soar. Troubling Vision is a beautifully written; original; and important addition to the field of American Studies.rdquo;mdash;Announcement of the American Studies Association for the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize