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Book Reviews
‘‘North’’ is not a space where one can go to ‘‘escape’’ the fact of blackness is curiously avoided (90). In ‘‘Excess flesh: black women performing hypervisibility,’’ Fleetwood delivers her third and finest chapter, unapologetically investigating the works of black female performers/artists who radically embody the problematically gendered, racialized, and sexualized dominant representations to remake new ways of being, doing, thinking, and visualizing black female subjectivity. Weaving through high art, black popular culture, and mainstream culture, Fleetwood places Renee Cox, Tracey Rose, Janet Jackson, Ayanah Moore, and Lil’ Kim center stage to develop her theory of ‘‘excess flesh.’’ Excess flesh is a concept that extends Rebecca Schneider’s ‘‘explicit body,’’ with the help of Hortense Spillers’s distinction between body and flesh, to distinguish the relationship black women have to norms of ‘‘standard’’ white femininity. A significant contribution to black feminist performance theory, ‘‘excess flesh’’ signifies the kind of performance that is not necessarily intended to be ‘‘liberatory,’’ ‘‘respectable,’’ or ‘‘real’’ representations of black female subjectivity, but rather a performance that in and of itself makes visible the inherent trouble in the ways black women have historically, socially, and politically been marked (109, 110, 112). In an effort to trace the relationship between the commodification of the black male body in advertising and nationalist ideals of a ‘‘new, cool’’ American-ness fueled by capitalism, Fleetwood takes a rather abrupt turn from performances of excess flesh toward performances of stylized masculinity in hip-hop culture in chapter four. In her shortest chapter, Fleetwood offers a familiar argument about the stylish, hyper-heteromasculine male subject as the representative of hip-hop culture, peppered with rehearsed commentary on black women’s and young white men’s primarily consumptive role in hip-hop (fashion). Her analyses of various ad campaigns and the assumed ‘‘trouble’’ she locates therein are outweighed by what amounts to a quick history of hip-hop fashion and the rise of the male hip-hop mogul. Had Fleetwood utilized her concept of ‘‘excess flesh’’ in a sustained analysis of the marketing and advertising for the rich examples she glosses over here (Baby Phat or Eve’s Fetish line, for example), the chapter may have produced a significant analytical shift to examinations of women in hip-hop fashion specifically and feminist approaches to hip-hop studies broadly (168). Ultimately this chapter lacks the fresh theoretical move-making typical to the rest of the book. Chapter five focuses on the work of one visual artist whose purpose is to make visible the ‘‘gaps, erasures, and ellipses’’ in the fabric of otherwise neatly sewn together dominant Western visual narratives specifically in regards to black female subjects (179, 182). To illustrate how multimedia artist Fatimah Tuggar’s (un)stitched aesthetic forcefully and playfully disrupts static spatialities and linear temporalities, Fleetwood discusses various photo/video/poster/collages in which ‘‘unlikely’’ elements are visibly fused together; for example, in Tuggar’s video collage Fusion cuisine (2000) an African female body is digitally inserted into a scene of idealized American consumer culture circa 1950s. Fleetwood sees in Tuggar’s works the potential to come to problematic Western representations, or a lack thereof, of black female subjectivity from a perspective that makes the problems of geographic,