Fleetwood notes that Shabazz worked with black newyorkers “to produce idealized images of urban black style and life” (150). The engulfing and oppressive urban milieu invites self-reflection and a wish to assert one’s worth through visual and material means, something that is also expressed by hip-hop culture. These works show that since the 1970s the city, New York especially, has defined racialized embodiment and self-presentation, functioning as material limit and horizon of black self-definition. Hendricks and Jamel Shabazz that exemplify the post-civil rights iconicization of the black male body rooted in modern-day flaneurism. The chapter begins by referencing the photography of Barkley L. 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 attitude.įleetwood looks at hip-hop fashion, particularly at the advertising strategies of Simmons’s Phat Farm brand and the public presentation and look of Combs, as the sites of a “visual resignification” of the symbols, meanings, and social conditions of postindustrial, urban black life. 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.

Troubling Vision by Nicole R. Fleetwood