Spectacular Opacities

Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality and Blackness (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 6.

Fred Moten, “Some Propositions on Blackness, Phenomenology, and (Non)Performance,” in Points of Convergence: Alternative Views on Performance, ed. by Marta Dziewańska and André Lepecki (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2017), 102.

Anne Anlin Cheng, “Her Own Skin,” in Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford University Press, 2011), 6.

Sable Elyse Smith, “FEAR TOUCH POLICE,” The Swiss Institute, October 27, 2020–January 14, 2022 →.

Anne Anlin Cheng, “Passing, Natural Selection, and Love’s Failure: Ethics of Survival from Chang-Rae Lee to Jacques Lacan,” American Literary History 17, no. 3 (Autumn 2005): 555.

Cheng, “Passing,” 555.

Cheng, “Passing,” 555.

Cheng, “Passing,” 558.

Cheng, “Shine: On Race, Glamour, and the Modern,” PMLA 126, no. 4 (2011): 1027.

See →.

“What place does the enslaved female occupy within the admittedly circumscribed scope of black existence or slave personhood? As a consequence of this disavowal of offense, is her scope of existence even more restricted? Does she exist exclusively as property? Is she insensate? What are the repercussions of this construction of person for the meaning of ‘woman’? … The law’s selective recognition of slave personhood … failed to acknowledge the matter of sexual violation, specifically rape, and thereby defined the identity of the slave female by the negation of sentience, an invulnerability to sexual violation, and the negligibility of her injuries … What is at stake here is not maintaining gender as an identitarian category but rather examining gender formation in relation to property relations, the sexual economy of slavery, and the calculation of injury.” Saidiya Harman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997), 97.

Kate Flint, “Prologue,” Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination (Oxford University Press, 2018), 1.

Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Duke University Press, 2006), 7.

Campt defines black feminist futurity as “a tense of anteriority, a tense relationship to an idea of possibility that is neither innocent nor naive … The grammar of black feminist futurity … moves beyond a simple definition of the future tense as what will be in the future … It strives for the tense of possibility that grammarians refer to as the future real conditional or that which will have had to happen. The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must … It is the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be. It’s a politics of pre-figuration that involves living the future now.” Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017), 17.

Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors,” Souls 18, no. 1 (January–March 2016): 171.

Campt, Listening to Images, 10.

Campt, Listening to Images, 10.

Harman, Scenes of Subjection, 86.

Harman, Scenes of Subjection, 76.

Harman, Scenes of Subjection, 77.

Harman, Scenes of Subjection, 77.

Hartman, “Belly of the World.” As Hartman incisively observes: “It has proven difficult, if not impossible, to assimilate black women’s domestic labors and reproductive capacities within narratives of the black worker, slave rebellion, maroonage, or black radicalism, even as this labor was critical to the creation of value, the realization of profit and the accumulation of capital. It has been no less complicated to imagine the future produced by such labors as anything other than monstrous” 167.

In a sense, Lawson’s photographs of nude black women raise and engage questions formulated by Nicole R. Fleetwood: “Can hypervisibility be a performative strategy that points to the problem of the black female body in the visual field? Can visuality be deployed to redress the excessive black female body?” Troubling Vision, 110.

Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 77. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 117.

Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 78.

Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior (Greywolf Press, 2004), 9.

Cheng, “Shine,” 1026.

Nora Wendl, “Vitruvian Figure(s),” in Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility, ed. Isabele Loring Wallace and Nora Wendl (Ashgate, 2013), 254.

The second, Vitruvian Figure (2009), is a large-scale sculpture that stands at approximately two-and-a-half meters tall, six meters wide, and five meters long, and comprises a massive architectural miniature design of a curved wooden seating array, which is cut like a section from an outdoor sports stadium in the concentric form of the Roman Colosseum. The cut section is typically encased by a stainless-steel and two-way-mirrored glass wall in an L shape that encases the cropped section of concentric stadium seating on both its long edges, so that from the exterior of the sculpture the wooden seating is clearly visible. As one turns a corner to stand inside the crook of the L-shaped glass-and-steel wall, the mirrored surface of the wall reflects this one section in each direction, turning the triangular fragment into a circular whole in the polished surface of the glass.

Nora Wendl, “Body Building: Paul Pfeiffer’s Vitruvian Figures” (lecture, 99th Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) Annual Meeting, Where Do You Stand, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, March 3–6, 2011). Published in conference proceedings, 521–26 →.

Wendl, “Vitruvian Figure(s),” 255.

Wendl, “Vitruvian Figure(s),” 260.

Wendl, “Vitruvian Figure(s),” 263.

Wendl, “Vitruvian Figure(s),” 264.

Paul Pfeiffer, interview by Jennifer Gonzalez, BOMB, no. 83, April 1, 2003 →.

“There is little evidence that stadiums provide even local economic benefits. Decades of academic studies consistently find no discernible positive relationship between sports facilities and local economic development, income growth, or job creation. And local benefits aside, there is clearly no economic justification for federal subsidies for sports stadiums.” Alexander K. Gold, Austin J. Drucker, and Ted Gayer, “Why the Federal Government Should Stop Spending Billions on Private Sports Stadiums,” Brookings Institute, September 8, 2016 →.

I borrow the phrase “monstrous intimacies” from Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010).

Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 4.

Nicole Fleetwood, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2015), 91.

Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 23.

Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 13.

David Marriott, “On Decadence: Bling Bling,” e-flux journal, no. 79 (February 2017) →.

See: →.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete (Minor Compositions, 2021), 53.

Marriott, “On Decadence.”

Samantha Rafelson, “NBA Agrees To Use Arenas As Polling Places In Deal To Resume Playoffs,” NPR, August 28, 2020 →. After Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back in front of his infant sons on August 23, 2020, the Milwaukee Bucks led a proliferating series of walkouts during the NBA playoffs that led to the threat of a general strike. Part of the settlement achieved with the players involved NBA franchises opening up their stadia as sites in which to cast votes in the presidential election that fall. While the electoral implications of the player’s protests were no doubt consequential to the outcome of the election, three days before the NBA announced the league’s expansion of access to the democractic franchise, white seventeen-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse travelled from Illinois to Wisconsin, armed with an AR-15 rifle, and deputised himself in armed “defense” of the police. In a confrontation with peaceful protesters, he shot dead two unarmed people and injured a third. Always, black political agency within the confines of white institutions exacerbates the painful distinction between reform and abolition.

Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 8.

Cheng, “Shine,” 1030.

Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1.

Jackie Wang, “Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety,” LIES Journal, vol. 1 (2012) →.

In Lawson’s debut monograph, Mama Goma is the third image in the sequence of the book, and The Garden is the book’s final image. The first image of the book’s sequence (Baby Sleep, 2009) also figures black maternity through a portrait of a nude black woman, situating black femininity, maternity, and sexuality as the central seam of the book as a whole. See Deana Lawson, Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph (Aperture Foundation, 2018).

Maternal death is defined as “the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy, irrespective of the duration and site of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management but not from unintentional or incidental causes.” World Health Organization, Trends in Maternal Mortality 2000–2017: Estimates by WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, World Bank Group and United Nations Population Division, September 19, 2019, 7 →.

World Health Organization, Trends in Maternal Mortality 2000–2017.

These ratios are defined as “lifetime risk of maternal death.” See Trends in Maternal Mortality 2000–2017, 35.

Linda Villarosa, “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis,” New York Times Magazine, April 11, 2018 →.

Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 112 (emphasis in original).

Fleetwood, “Excess Flesh,” 122, 112, 113.

“Caryatid,” Encyclopedia Britannica →.

Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Thoughts of Liberation,” Canadian Art, June 17, 2020 →.

Anne Anlin Cheng, “Do You See It? Well, It Doesn’t See You!” interview by Tom Holert, in “Supercommunity,” special issue, e-flux journal, no. 65 (2015) →.

Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 56.

Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 56.

Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 5.

Cheng, “Shine,” 1030.

Cheng, “Shine,” 1023.

Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 8.

Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 80.

Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 8n13.

“Nataraja,” Encyclopedia Britannica →.

Cheng, “Shine,” 1038 (emphasis mine).

Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 3.

Cheng, “Shine,” 1032.