issue of the signifying values and meanings attributed to black iconic images in public culture. She particularly focuse
ALH Online Review, Series XIII 1 Nicole Fleetwood, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (Rutgers UP, New Brunswick, NJ, 2015), 144 pp. Reviewed by Michael Boyce Gillespie, City College of New York Nicole Fleetwood’s On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination is an innovative and dynamic study of blackness, iconicity, and visual culture. The book is a part of the Pinpoints series from Rutgers University Press and amply fulfills its mission of bringin forward concise, accessible books. Fleetwood’s monograph is compelled by the crucial issue of the signifying values and meanings attributed to black iconic images in public culture. She particularly focuses on the production and circulation of racial icons and poses throughout US history by focusing on photography and its entanglement of race, nation, and representation. As she observes, On Racial Icons is a meditation on how we . . . fixate on certain images of race and nation, specifically the black icon. In examining the significance of the racial icon to public life in the United States, the book attempts to understand the relationship between the nation, representation, and race in the context of the history of U.S. slavery and the present of enduring racial inequality. (1) With photography as its object, the book is a rigorous and approachable call for critical attention to how black iconic images always circulate in the US as a deeply cathected negotiation with issues of aesthetics, history, and culture. The book’s address of an American public is not done with singularity in mind. Instead, Fleetwood acutely poses a multi-accentual and multidisciplinary reading strategy. Significantly, On Racial Icons takes up public images, images most immediately without a curatorial directive and instead freely move in a public circuit. The four interrelated chapters also operate as distinct studies of the affective, political, cultural, and historical textures of the racial icon’s public life. These chapters each demonstrate a distinct theme of racial iconicity and public culture: activism, political leadership, celebrity, and sports. Instead of monolithic speculation, Fleetwood conceives of an American public as multivalent and always contextual. In her chapter devoted to Trayvon Martin, Fleetwood considers the collective mourning, media circulation, and activist momentum generated by his murder. Her consideration of the circulation of Martin’s selfie in a hoodie is a stunning reading of the charged connotative ways that the image represents an ordinary black child, but it also demonstrates his casual self-portraiture and self-valuation that retroactively circulated as a veneration and foreshadowing. Moreover, the identificatory circuits generated by Martin’s iconic image, and its solicitation of “I am Trayvon Martin,” receives necessary attention here. Fleetwood considers how photography has functioned as an important
© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
[email protected]
2 ALH Online Review, Series XIII art for the sake of black activist struggle. Plus, she posits that the circulation of this image participates in a historical continuum with that of Emmitt Till. She makes original insights on collectivity, organizing, mourning, and why some are mourned more than others, if at all. As Fleetwood writes, We intimately enfold the image of Martin, smiling from under his hoodie, into our narratives of family, belonging, and love. We publicly memorialize Martin’s photograph and murder as part of the long, painful, and unfolding narratives of race, violence and the American public sphere. We are not Trayvon Martin. We are alive. Like him, though, those of us who are vulnerable to the terror and violence of racial hatred, we hold his photograph even more tenderly. (30) Elsewhere, Fleetwood deftly considers the cathected and entangled promises of US democracy and the politics of representations in the figure of Barack Obama. She avoids a progressive narrative impulse that might insist on Obama’s presidency as an enacting a resolution to the nation’s enduring racial narrative of privilege and disenfranchisement. Fleetwood instead draws upon a rich pool of history and scholarship to map out the black political legacy of photography from Frederick Douglass to the civil rights movement to the modern era. Her stunning analysis considers the performative and political consequences of this historical use of photography toward understanding how Obama has been framed as the fruition of a genealogical ideal of black male leadership. Her sharply focused consideration of the visual imagining of Obama is also measured with a concentration on his political deviation from the black political legacy that shaped his iconic promise. Fleetwood locates her critical address in the breach between what Robin D. G. Kelley calls “freedom dreams” and the ways Obama’s presidency appeared to follow in the ideological footsteps of previous presidencies instead of the ideological demand of hope declared by his constituencies. In a brilliant pivot from black masculinity, Fleetwood turns to a richly detailed, sharp focus on the celebrity figure of Diana Ross. Through Ross, Fleetwood enacts a thorough examination of the aesthetics of black femininity, the icon as star, celebrity culture, and the entertainment industry. Fleetwood distills the legendary singer’s star persona by scrutinizing the aesthetics of giving face, “a self-conscious and deliberate practice of elevating one’s facial features . . . with the intention of producing desire, envy, and idolization” (58). Significantly, the chapter’s consideration of issues of lighting, makeup, and portraiture grounds Fleetwood’s compelling study of the historical and cultural consequence of a black woman as celebrity icon. For example, instead of reducing the celebrity strictly to the terms of commodity spectacle, Fleetwood considers how Ross’s enactment of beauty parallels the “Black is Beautiful” cultural politics of the Black Consciousness movement. Furthermore, Fleetwood rigorously contextualizes Ross
ALH Online Review, Series XIII 3 within a historical continuum of black women stars, giving consequential detail to the distinct ways in which Ross “embodies musical history and her racial and gendered legacy through performing as earlier entertainers as a mode of paying homage” (73). This point holds a great deal of pedagogical possibilities as Fleetwood’s concentration on Ross provides for considering how contemporary black women musicians extend and embody the continued legacy of the black celebrity. Fleetwood’s chapter on the black athlete focuses on the LeBron James and Serena Williams as “American cultural icons,” with attention to the tension of blackness, corporate branding, and the culture of sports. Here Fleetwood begins her a rich analysis of historical and cultural contexts with a brief reading of the history of Jack Johnson and his fraught negotiations inside and outside the boxing ring. Her historiography of the iconicity of the black athlete extends to Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Muhammed Ali, and the 1968 Mexico Olympic Games protesters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos. As she has throughout the book, Fleetwood reanimates the past as offering significantly enduring issues that impact the present and the future. Before transitioning to the main objects of her investigation, Fleetwood studies the prestige of Michael Jordan and the “wedding of celebrity athletes with American capitalism” (88). The combination of Jordan’s iconicity and the highly lucrative global expansion of the NBA lends itself to her dazzling pivot to James and Williams. This section of the chapter considers the James’s rise as Jordan’s heir apparent and James’s transformation from hometown hero as blue-collar warrior to the unraveling of that mythic promise with his decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers to play for the Miami Heat. It is the public outcry and deeply antiblack sentiment generated by James’s choice to leave Cleveland that Fleetwood succinctly observes. Moreover, she demonstrates the tenuous place of the black athlete as racial icon and public idol through James’s activist gestures concerning the murder of Trayvon Martin and the racist statements by former LA Clippers owner, Donald Sterling. Fleetwood’s consideration of Serena Williams, however, demonstrates even higher stakes in play for the iconic force of the black athlete. Fleetwood analyzes how Williams defied, and continues to defy, the conventional/white standards of tennis. Concentrated on issues of fashion, the black female body, hair, white femininity, and tennis spectators and commentators‘ antiblack resentment, the analysis is riveting throughout as Fleetwood offers a particularly insightful commentary to close on the inheritance that James and Williams bear: “Williams and James are still living and playing (with) their iconicity, their racial meanings unfolding in our increasingly corporatized and digitized lives as sports fans” (109).
4 ALH Online Review, Series XIII It is the conceptual arc of the book –an accruing examination of the meanings of the racial icon—that makes this study so effective. Fleetwood’s focus of visual culture as public culture makes On Racial Icons an extraordinary resource for the interdisciplinary teaching and study of African American studies, American studies, visual culture studies, and media studies. This is book is an important source for our current moment of a White House that has emboldened and recoded white supremacists, the continued proliferation and circulation of viral videos that attest to the murder of African Americans by law enforcement, greater political activism by black athletes, a greater presence of black women pop artists, and the increased rise of the black woman athlete. Fleetwood’s book is of vital use in all classrooms dedicated to the critical study of black visual culture, the racial icon, and the conflicted ways of America.
