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C H A P T E R

Optic Black: Blackness as

Phantasmagoria
11
Alessandra Raengo

I n Capital’s chapter on the commodity Karl Marx argues that a man-made thing appears as
a commodity when it is subject to exchange. Later, in the passage of the so-called
“Dancing Table,” which has been tremendously influential in theories of fetishism,1 Marx
describes the seeming ‘transformation’ of a mundane and unproblematic sensuous object,
such as a table, into a commodity. The commodity, he writes, is something supra-sensible,
something beyond the table’s tangible materiality. Among other things, the passage
addresses the way in which the concept of ‘form’ (in this case the ‘commodity form’ – the fact
that, when coming forth as object of exchange, the table assumes the form of a commodity)
emerges as a principle of visibility: there is form when something appears as something else.
The table doesn’t change: it still has four legs, a top, and it is still made of wood. But what
changes is the way it exists in the social space. No longer simply a use value, i.e. an object
that is valued because of the use that it can be put to, but an exchange value as well.2 What
interests me is that Marx established that the commodity as such is not a thing, but rather a
form, a way of being, an appearance, the expression of the thing’s ability to exchange.
This is important because blackness has a very intimate relationship with the commod-
ity form, one rooted in slavery of course,3 but surviving also in the way blackness has con-
tinued to circulate in popular and visual culture.4 This relationship, in other words, is all but
new and yet, what I think needs more attention is the concept of form understood, in the
Marxian sense, as a principle of visibility; as the appearance of something—both in the sense
of its ‘coming into visibility’ and in the sense of the way something looks. Thus this essay

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asks: when does the commodity black become visible as such? Or, more precisely, what type
of commodity is the one for which blackness acts as principle of visibility?5
To pursue these questions this essay does not concern itself with cinematic portrayals of
blackness, i.e. it is not about blackness as a visual object in search of adequate representa-
tion, but rather about blackness as a language and a principle of visualization. This is so
because I am convinced that blackness—a most carnal and at the same time most abstract
visual property—can shed light onto the contemporary ontology of the visual; it can teach
us something about the way in which we live with, understand, and use, images. Race, in
fact, continues to provide the most enduring template for what constitutes a visible sign.
My methodological premise lies in something that Benjamin said about prostitution
and that Stephen Best has argued characterizes slavery even more, which is the fact that the
commodity celebrates its becoming human in the slave, in the attempt to look at itself in the
face.6 The idea is that there is something to be gained by looking not only at what happens
to the concept of the person when it can be commodified but also, conversely, at what hap-
pens to the concept of the commodity when the black slave is counted as one.7 Therefore my
emphasis on the form of the commodity attempts to get at precisely this: the way in which,
in our contemporary moment, ‘black’ gives form—i.e. appearance and visibility—to com-
modity status. This also explains not only what set of visual materials I focus on to begin to
answer the questions posed by this essay, but also how I look at them: not so much for what
they show, but for what face they put on, what sits on their surface, as it were, what they wear
on their sleeves.
That blackness and whiteness are distinct from black and white people is increasingly
accepted today as is the overwhelming self-referentiality of the images circulating in our con-
temporary visual culture. And yet, racial images (and what constitutes a ‘racial image’ is
another concept that this essay puts into play) are still affected by what in a literary context
Henry Louis Gates defined as a naturalist fallacy, i.e. the expectation that visual signifiers of race
are responsible for faithfully and authentically representing ‘black people,’ rather than social
relations.8 In other words, visual signifiers of race are still taken at face value. Hence my empha-
sis on form, appearance, surface, and face. Especially face, which, as Kimberly Lamm suggests,
is “an image suspended between the concept of race and the physicality of the body.”9
I begin with Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled because its use of blackface makes an explicit
demand to seriously engage with the film’s surfaces. Blackface, in fact, is a very specific kind
of racial image, one created by the application of a man-made signifier on top of the face: a
black coating that functions as the subject’s interface. Blackface is obviously not a naturalistic
sign—it does not resemble anything or anyone—but rather a second-degree signifier of race:
it is an image of blackness as image of race. Its referent is not black people, but the epider-
mality of race, in other words, the fact that race’s scopic regime is built on the blackness of
the skin. Through this leverage that the film employs literally at the level of the plot, and
metaphorically as a trope of the relations of exploitation and commodification of blackness
in the entertainment industry, Bamboozled argues that the commodity form in contemporary
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Figure 11.1 Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000)

material culture has a face, and that face is black. This is because material culture is still
determined by the commodity relations of slavery. Bamboozled presents slavery, as Bill Brown
puts it, not as a historical phenomenon—a historical event that, occurred in the past and has
attained its closure—but rather as a historical ontology, i.e. an enduring systemic breakdown
of the distinction between humans and things.
In his essay titled “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Brown argues
that such a breakdown is most evident in the racist memorabilia that populate the film
because of how “these objects might be said to deanimate [], to arrest the stereotype, to ren-
der it in three-dimensional stasis, to fix a demeaning and/or romanticizing racism with the
fortitude of solid form.”10 Brown identifies one of the film’s great achievements in having re-
circulated in the same space blackface, stereotypes and sambo art, in order to show that their
blackness coincides with their shared commodity form.11 This is effectively presented in the
scene in which the racist artifacts populating Pierre Delacroix’s office re-animate and take
revenge against the creator of the ‘New Millennium Minstrel Show.’ (Fig. 1) This is a crucial
moment for Bill Brown because it stages “the recollection of the ontological scandal perpetrated
by slavery, as the reanimation of the reified black body; not some literalization of the
commodity fetish, but the reenactment of the breakdown of the person/thing binary—the
‘relentless objectification’ that reappears as the personification of objects (Fig. 2).12
This continuum, the return of the personhood that had been wiped from the slave as the
animation of a mechanical object, for Brown, represents the American uncanny.13 Which is a
way of saying, among other things, that the commodity form sits squarely at the heart of
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Figure 11.2 Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000)

what defines America. Thus not only was the slave always a hybrid commodity, a persona
mixta,14 argues Stephen Best, that is, an object of property as well as a subject of sentiment (as
in abolitionist literature) or of obligations (in the Fugitive Slaves Law); not only do the
remnants of this hybridity still haunt the text of the law as critical race theorists have been
arguing for some time;15 but blackness always acted as the principle of visibility of commodity
status as well as its abstract form. Slavery, argues Best, is a changing form of the commodity
relation, “a particular historical form of an ongoing crisis involving the subjection of person-
hood to property.”16
To get at the ‘American uncanny’ Spike Lee stages multiple scenarios of interchangeabil-
ity between personhood and thingness: in the example just mentioned, with camera angles
and a lighting design that reconstitutes for artifacts already permeated by ontological insta-
bility, the personhood that had been robbed from the subjects after which they are suppos-
edly modeled. This is a strategy that the film shares with David Levinthal’s photographs of
sambo art, which also hangs on the wall of Delacroix’s office (Fig. 3)17 Furthermore, across
several visual styles, ranging from the high definition video, to low definition pixilated
images of the television commercials, to the saturated colors of the live performance of the
Minstrel Show, the film emphasizes blackness as a signifier that sits equally on the surface of
the body and of commodity culture. Indeed, blackness is what allows these two realms to
swiftly swap their ‘skins.’
In the sequence of the broadcast of the season premier of Man Tan: The New Millennium
Minstrel Show, however, Lee suggests another level of abstraction for blackness. With satu-
rated color and disembodied camera placement a la Busby Berkeley, the sequence shows a
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Figure 11.3 Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000)

huge mouth opening to let out two dancing puppets in the likeness of the show’s two stars
who, along with the production assistant, are watching the broadcast in dismay. Two com-
mercials immediately follow: one for an aphrodisiac drink named ‘The Bomb’ and the other
for a line of ‘ghetto wear’ designed by Tommy Hillnigger (Fig. 4 and 5). What interests me
is the quick transition between two stages of the commodity form of blackness: blackness as
an object and blackness as aesthetics. In the Minstrel Show, ‘black’ occupies the uncertain
border zone between the human and the object – the animated puppet that, within the
system of objects of the film, takes on the same ominous quality of the re-animated black
memorabilia. A blackness supposedly abstracted from living bodies and turned into mate-
rial signifier – burnt cork makeup – equally coats the faces of the entertainers, the puppets
made to their likeness, and a host of mass-produced household objects whose function is to
nostalgically perpetuate the social relations of slavery. In the commercials, instead, black-
ness appears as a central element within the aesthetics of what Michael Schudson has called
‘capitalist realism,’ that is, the imagination/visualization of a way of experiencing things
that supports the material and social relations of capitalism.18 Fully self-contained and self-
referential, capitalist realism occupies its own plane of reality that, just like the minstrel
show, presents itself as mimetic but is instead fully simulacral.19 Whereas in the first case
blackness is the face of reification that solidifies the commodified body into an object, in the
case of the commercials blackness is the face of the signifying system that enables capitalist
realism to say ‘I love you’ to itself.
I believe this flaunting of blackness, as the language through which the system romances
itself would fall under what W.T. Lhamon would call ‘optic black.’ Optic black is the concept
he uses to elaborate on the metaphor of color capital that Ralph Ellison employs in the
‘Liberty Paint’ episode in Invisible Man. There, the narrator discovers the secret of the
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Figure 11.4 Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000) – TV commercial for ‘The Bomb’

factory’s best selling optic white paint. It is black boiler worker Lucius Browkway, who oper-
ates the factory’s machinery, add 10 drops of ‘dead black’ liquid, and ‘dips his finger’ in the
white mixture. As he famously claims: “Them machines just do the cooking, there here
hands right here do the sweeting.”20 Harryette Mullen reads this episode as a metaphor of
the process of assimilation as passing, which, in turn, she considers the “model for the cul-
tural production of whiteness.”21
The Liberty Paint episode stages assimilation as the production of whiteness via incor-
poration of the raw materials of blackness in a manner that erases the traces of this very
process. Lucius Browkway is a ghost in the machine: he is an enabling black presence that
augments a white color capital. But whereas in Ellison, as per Harryette Mullen’s persuasive
reading, whiteness is manufactured through processes of assimilation dependent on black
invisibility, Lhamon’s starting point is the contribution to whiteness performed by the exces-
sive visibility of blackness, and their endorsement of such visibility in order to display their
refusal to fit. Optic black, in other words, is performative and deliberately exhibitionist.22
What is at stake, then, is not simply the performance of demeaning images for purposes
of subversion—what is often referred to as the ‘reversal of the stereotype’ or, as Manthia
Diawara, commenting on the art of Michael Ray Charles, Kara Walker, and David Levinthal
puts it, the ‘desire for’ the stereotype23—but rather a shift in the location of blackness from
the sphere of production to the sphere of exhibition. While Ellison indicts a cultural optics
that spectralizes black labor for the production of a white color capital, the notion of optic
black, instead, calls attention to the fact that blackness has become a visual signifier which
becomes more valuable the more it is removed from the sphere of production. Blackness sev-
ers its connection to black labor, but once liberated from it, acts instead as currency in the
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Figure 11.5 Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000) – TV commercial for “Tommy Hillnigger”

sphere of exchange. In this respect, Bamboozled’s great achievement is showing how black-
ness migrates from the surface of the body to the surface of commodity culture and beyond
this to the vocabulary of capitalist realism, where commodity culture attempts to look at
itself in the face.
The work of Hank Willis Thomas claims a similar place for blackness. His photographs
are generally crafted to reproduce not only the aesthetic, but also the intermediate plane of
capitalist realism, slipping in and around our consciousness just as advertising does, so that
their commonplace appearance, argues Rene de Guzman, “gives them the kind of legitimacy
accorded to things existing in the natural world.” This means that his works’ ontological
claim to the real is dependent both on their ability to camouflage as actual advertising and
on sharing advertising’s cumulative effect—the insistence with which it clutters our visual
landscape.24 This is the case in a pseudo Master Card ad (Fig. 6) crafted around the photo-
graph of the funeral of Thomas’s cousin Songha Willis Thomas, inexplicably shot dead by
another black man who had just stolen his gold chain. Built and publicly hung as a billboard,
this image’s deceptive face, fully compliant with the aesthetics of other ‘priceless’ Master
Card ads, encourages a distracted reception, while the superimposed text quietly, but sternly,
demands that the viewer conjures up the horrible loss that lies beneath it.
For his UNBRANDED series25 Willis Thomas collected a number of print advertise-
ments from 1968 to 2008 featuring African American models or directed at black con-
sumers, and digitally removed their captions. The goal was to show how blackness
functions as a language through which capitalist realism enables material relations to be
rendered and resolved as visual relations. Stripping these images of their advertising text
reveals the underlying work and trajectories of desires. (Fig. 7) The fantasy structure that
sustains the unholy marriage between race and consumption comes to the surface and
makes black bodies appear central to the signification of capitalism, sometimes simply as
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Figure 11.6 Hank Willis Thomas, Priceless #1 (2004)

Figure 11.7 Hank Willis Thomas, Are you the Right Kind of Woman for It? (UNBRANDED, 1974/2007)

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items within a color palette and other times as part of a wish fulfillment (Fig. 8)—vital
ingredients to the reproduction and reaffirmation of a color capital that remains optic
white.26 The UNBRANDED series further superficializes a language that is already entirely
focused on its outer appearance and, just like blackface, has no referent outside of its own
economy of desire.
In his earlier B®ANDED series, instead, Hank Willis Thomas specifically interrogates
the relationship of advertising images to the visual archives of slavery, which he re-animates
from within the icons of contemporary consumer culture (Fig. 9). As Robin Kelley puts it,
Willis Thomas is not interested “in blackface imagery; he draws on the archives of slavery
itself, which he then links to contemporary representations of black men. Nor is he interested
in artifice. What makes his work resonate so powerfully is his ability to plumb the archives
without stripping the object/artifacts/texts of their historical moorings.”27
Of vital important to his project is the choice of the photographic medium, which he
employs in a historical perspective in order to both reanimate and disrupt its role in natural-
izing the visuality of race.28 His work superficializes photography as well, in order to dispute
the way in which, historically and semiotically, the photographic effect has come to reinforce
the racial effect – the fact that as the photographic image is conceived as a trace of the object
before the camera (an index, semiotically speaking) so black skin is read as a trace of ‘race’.29
In the B®ANDED series one has the sense that photography and race are equally handled as
a second skin: none of them is natural, but both have been naturalized and made to adhere
to the body.
For Willis Thomas, in other words, race is a form of political and economic domination
that has become incarnated in the sense of acquiring a social (rather than biological) material-
ity.30 Hence he renders the enduring ontology of slavery as a trace, which has and continues
to visibly mark the body—branding it, in fact. Scarred Chest, (Fig. 10) recapitulates two very
different but still connected iconographic traditions: on the one hand Mapplethorpe’s erotica
then co-opted within an advertising frame in Annie Leibovitz’ photo of Dennis Rodman; on
the other hand, the abolitionist icon The Scourged Back – an image widely circulated because
of its ability to index the brutality of slavery.31 By substituting the whipping marks with the
Nike logo, Willis Thomas constructs blackness and commodity culture as two competing
inscriptions of value onto the body. The key concept being that they are both inscriptions –
iconic projections of a socio-material arrangement, not intrinsic properties of the object. An
image where race appears equally constructed by the blackness of the skin and the branding
of the brand foregrounds the ability of race to ‘attach’ itself to the body.
By reanimating the properly structure of slavery still contained within the contemporary
commerce of blackness as the primary form of racial indexing – indeed by setting up against
each other photographic and epidermal indexicality – Willis Thomas disrupts the coinci-
dence between photographic and racial index. In peeling one off from the other, and insert-
ing icons of consumer culture in their middle (Fig. 11 B®ANDED “Absolut”) he
simultaneously challenges photography’s own reliance on its own face value. In his work it
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Figure 11.8 Hank Willis Thomas, Ode to the Ill Na Na

(UNBRANDED 1981/2007)

Figure 11.9 Hank Willis Thomas, Absolute

Power (2003)

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Figure 11.10 Hank Willis Thomas, Scarred Chest (2004)

is the commodity form that takes the semblance of the index: it brands, it acquires its own
corporeality, and, acting like a second skin, it becomes face value.32
But what happens when there is no face to speak of? When blackness is no longer avail-
able as a visual object?
As Harry Elam comments, the increased visibility of blackness in contemporary visual
and material culture paradoxically attests to a new and de-materialized way in which it func-
tions—as an agent of abstraction. Blackness, in other words, seems to circulate on its own,
quite apart from black bodies and consequently, from the history of black people as well.
In order to explore what guarantees this circulation, a good number of artists (both black and
‘postblack’33) have interrogated this new stage of the commodity form of race by exposing its
rules of legibility in scenarios deprived of visual objects. I am thinking, for example, about con-
ceptual cyber art such as damali ayo’s rent-a-negro.com, a website where it is seemingly possible
to rent a well-mannered African-American woman to be accompanied at social events or simply
to increase one’s reputation; or Keith Obadike’s Blackness for Sale. The latter artwork is an ebay
auction of the artist’s blackness. In his product description, Obadike claims, among other things,
that the ‘blackness’ he is selling can be used to create black art, but not serious art; it can be used
to say the N-word without repercussions, but it is not recommended while seeking justice or
employment. It offers ‘cool,’ but not fairness. Following the rules of engagement of the market-
place allows Obadike to describe the commodity blackness in its contemporary form, that is, as a
phantasmatic entity—valued for what it enables, both discursively and socially. Obadike exposes
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Figure 11.11 Hank Willis Thomas, Absolut (2007)

a number of factors that determine the variable value of blackness and offers to sell, just like
damali ayo, not what blackness is, but what it does. In these works blackness does not pre-exist
the act of exchange, but rather, it exists as the manufactured product of a transaction that the
works themselves initiate. Consequently, the works expose that racial identity is not lodged in a
pre-existing essence, but it is rather reconfigured as a number of possible subject positions in
response to the art itself.34 Blackness, then, emerges as a structuring principle and a language of
social relations. By being openly set forth in the form of a commodity, it offers, as Marx explains
in his opening chapter of Capital, the best vantage point on the capitalist system as a whole.
Blackness for Sale brings to the surface another important sense in which the index speaks
to the value of blackness, a value that has become independent from its visual presence. In
fact, Obadike’s goal was to test the value of blackness in a commercial context shared pre-
cisely with cookie jars and darkies posters, but by withholding any image and just allowing
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consumers to fantasize as to what blackness would mean to them: “many people” he claims,
“understand blackness as something that lives in the realm of vision and because there was
no photo on the auction page it gave room for some to fantasize about how they would
occupy this space.”35 And yet, blackness still functions as a principle of visualization,36 partly
because it operates in the context of what Michael Kaplan has called ‘iconomics:’ the way in
which a market index measures value as well as indicates the status of the system by provid-
ing an image of the investors’ feelings about it.37 In fact, the market index is determined by,
but also reflective of, the collective opinion of the market participants: each investor specu-
lates about what others might be speculating about. Consequently, as a social imaginary, ico-
nomics is a system of simulation, whose only referent is the feelings that people have about
the system itself. Similarly, even though it does not unfold through visual means, Obadike’s
art work functions pictorially, as an indexical icon, because it provides a picture of a system
that, having to face its own desires, is caught in the act of looking at itself in the face.
What artists such as Obadike and damaly ayo show, according to Harry Elam, is that
blackness has reached a new level of abstraction and it can now “travel on its own, separate
and distinct from black people.” Blackness, he argues, has acquired the status of currency:
“blackness functions as something that you can apply, put on, wear, that you use to assuage
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social anxiety and perceived threat: the desire to be included without the necessity of includ-
ing black folk.” The problem, Elam specifies, is that “it remains exceedingly attractive and
possible in this post-black, postsoul age of black cultural traffic to love black cool and not
love black people.38
The fact that blackness can be made ‘detachable’ from black bodies – where it was made
to adhere by what had been constructed as its natural, ontological, visuality – is an indica-
tion of a new phase of development of the commodity form, what I will call blackness as phan-
tasmagoria, i.e. the stage in which an increasingly simulacral status of the visual develops its
own, independent, social-materiality.39
The phantasmagoria was a pre-cinematic device comprising a fully darkened room with
a ‘magic lantern’ placed behind a screen so that the screen and the apparatus would be con-
cealed from view; the audience only saw floating images without anchorage in any specific
place. This detachment of the visual from the material is what Marx found useful to describe
commodity fetishism and what Benjamin relied on to articulate his notion of exhibition
value. However, as Tom Gunning points out, because the phantasmagoria is based on a con-
scious deception of the senses, it contains the possibility for its own de-mystification. I intro-
duce the concept of phantasmagoria here because I believe it can offer critical tools to
understand how blackness has transitioned from being a bodily index to a market index;
from being the signifier of a corporeal property to being the signifier of speculative value. It
suggests that blackness might be the signifier for the current ontology of the image, one in
which an increasingly simulacral status of the visual has developed its own, independent,
social-materiality. Finally, it allows us to understand the current moment as another phase in
the journey of blackness from the surface of the body, to the surface of material culture to
where it is now—on the surface of the visual.

Endnotes
1. For an effective assessment of this passage’s influence in theories of fetishism see Brown, Bill. “The
Tyranny of Things (Trivia in Karl Marx and Mark Twain).” Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 442–69.
2. As Thomas Keenan puts it: “It seems that use values, as material, carry–support or transport – the
possibility of being deported or transferred elsewhere. The stofflich character of the thing as use value
seems paradoxically tied to the possibility its materiality may be evacuated in exchange. . . . It holds,
carries, its ‘own’ vacancy; it holds nothing but a place, the site of a possible relocation.” Keenan,
Thomas. “The Point Is to (Ex) Change It: Reading Capital, Rhetorically.” Fetishism as Cultural
Discourse. Ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993: 161.
3. For an important study of the commodity form of the slave see, Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural
Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in
Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 64–9 and
Best, Stephen. The Fugitive’s Properties. Law and the Poetics of Possession. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2004.
4. Among the many assessment of the commodification of blackness in popular and visual culture
see Watkins, Craig S. ““Black Is Black, and It’s Bound to Sell!” Nationalist Desire and the
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Production of Black Popular Culture.” Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and
Black Nationalism. Ed. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002: 189–214.
Davis, Angela Y. “Black Nationalism: The Sixties and the Nineties.” Black Popular Culture. Ed. Gina
Dent. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992: 317–24
5. One reason for such question can be traced back to the way in which historically the African slave
comes to embody important economic and semiotic categories. On the one hand, colonialism and the
slave trade bring the slave into existence a subject whose economic value is created in the process of
exchange. On the other hand, when the African is called ‘black,” i.e. when the slave is marked as dif-
ferent, he/she becomes the signifier of difference as well; the slave comes to not only be exchanged
but also measure and mean exchange. See Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies. Theorizing Race and
Gender Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995, “Visual Modernity”: 21–42.
6. Best paraphrases Benjamin’s statement that the “commodity attempts to look itself in the face. It
celebrates its becoming human in the whore.” “Central Park,” New German Critique 34 (Winter
1985): 42. Quoted in Best, 2.
7. See Arjun Appadurai’s introduction to his anthology The Social Life of Things. Commodities in
Cultural Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986 and Igor Kopytoff’s essay “The
Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” 64–91.
8. In his introduction to Black Literature and Literary Theory (Methuen: New York and London: 1985),
Henry Louis Gates lists, among the critical fallacies that have severely limited the analysis of black
literature, the ‘anthropology’, the ‘perfectibility’ and the ‘sociology’ fallacies. “Because of the curi-
ous valorization of the social and polemical functions of black literature, the structure of the black
text has been repressed and treated as if it were transparent. The black literary work of art has stood
at the center of a triangle of relations [], but as the very thing not to be explained, as if it were invis-
ible, or literal, or a one-dimensional document. [] Accordingly, mimetic and expressive theories of
black literature continue to predominate over the sorts of theories concerned with discrete uses of
figurative language” (5–6). On the contrary, understanding what constitutes a racial image neces-
sarily mobilizes a different set of questions: is race an appropriate critical framework only in con-
junction with images of (or by) black people, i.e. images in which the body functions as the
irrefutable, metaphysically present, anchor of race? Or is rather race, as Toni Morrison has
cogently argued, a defining epistemological structure in all American cultural production and
visual culture? I will argue for the second possibility and discuss race not as an attribute, but
rather as an epistemology of vision that affects the ontology of images, their reality status, and
their truth-value. See Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
9. “The face is not only a synecdoche for the body; it is the body’s most explicit locus of perception,
communication, and expression.” Lamm, Kimberly. “Visuality and Black Masculinity in Ralph
Ellison’s Invisible Man and Romare Bearden’s Photomontages.” Callaloo 26.3 (2003): 814.
10. Brown, Bill. “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny.” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006): 185.
11. The stereotype, argues Bhabha, is not the object of desire, but its setting; it is not an ascription
of a priori identities, but rather their production. More to the point, it operates like a fetish: it
is a scene of subject formation. It responds to multiple desires: to make present, to make visible,
to make knowable, and to fixate. See, H. Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype,
Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in The Location of Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1994): 94–120.
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12. “The point” writes Brown, “is that for these objects to come to life, for them to violate their status
as mere things, they must black up, they must perform within, or as, the ontological ambiguity
expressed by minstrelsy itself.” (200)
13. The ‘uncanny’ (‘unheimlich,’ literally ‘the unhomely,’ sometimes translated as “Disquieting
Strangeness) is a Freudian concept that expresses feelings of dread. It also names things that
should have remained hidden and have become instead visible. In Ernst Jentsch’s reading of
Freud’s 1919 essay on the subject, the uncanny is particularly attached to intellectual uncertainty
about whether something is alive or not. Because of its connection to the instability of personhood,
Brown invokes this concept to characterize the “history of this ontological ambiguity – human or
thing – [that] is precisely what remains repressed within U.S. culture.” (Brown, 199)
14. For this assessment, Best refers to Ernst Kantorowicz’s book The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in
Medieval Political Theology, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, an exploration of the “two
bodies” of the King. The King in fact, is a specific individual, but as king he is also “a symbolic
function, the unique incarnation of a network of social relations.” Quoted in Best, 6. In kinship,
society is given shape by a carnal body. Similarly, society’s property relations are given shape by the
bodies of the slaves.
15. See Crenshaw, Kimberly, et al., eds. Critical Race Theory. New York: The New York Press, 1995 and
Gotanda, Neil. “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution is Color-Blind’.” Critical Race Theory: The Cutting
Edge, 2nd ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stafanic. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000 and
Headley, Clevis. “Black Studies, Race, and Critical Race Theory: A Narrative Deconstruction of
Law.” A Companion to African-American Studies. Ed. Lewis R. Gordon, and Jane Anna Gordon.
Blackwell, 2006. 330–59
16. Once the fugitive slave is figured in the law as a debtor he is also figured as a person. Yet, paradoxi-
cally “the fabrication of the enslaved as indebted preserves property.” (80) “Debt makes property
appear in the form of personhood and translates ownership into obedience with all the effectiveness
expected of legal rhetoric. The constitutional clause regarding fugitive slaves fashions a shadow mar-
ket world in which slaves serve as the subjects and not the objects of exchange – legal specters of con-
tractual personhood that figure the agon of slavery’s economies.” Best, The Fugitive’s Property, 81.
17. David Levinthal, Blackface. L. David. Santa Fe, NM, Arena Editions, 1999. In Diawara’s reading,
Levinthal’s mise-en-scene engulfs the objects in blackness in order to bring whiteness (and its arti-
ficiality) to the surface. Levinthal stages blackness as a form of representation in order to show as
constructed the blackness of the object. This allows him to break “the ideological and aesthetic
contract by repositioning the image and weakening its identification with the intended original
meaning.” Diawara, Manthia. “The Blackface Stereotype.” Blackface. Levinthal David. Santa Fe,
NM: Arena Editions, 1999:15.
18. Michael Schudson, “Advertising as Capitalist Realism.” Advertising & Society, 1:1 (2000).
19. Capitalist realism presents itself as an accurate, if romanticized, depiction of the world, whereas its
images are rather what Jean Baudrillard defines as simulacra – the product of simulations – that
refer to nothing other than themselves (Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Harbor:
University of Michigan, 1994). This tension between a face value (i.e. a form of appearance) that
makes mimetic claims and its simulacral nature is what capitalist realism shares with blackface. In
fact, as already mentioned, blackface is a second-degree racial signifier because its first referent is
not “race,” but rather the epidermality of race. To be sure, blackface makeup was the expression of
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minstrelsy’s claim to be imitative of black culture even though early minstrel acts, as Eric Lott
writes, participated in “an exchange system of cultural signifiers that both produced and continu-
ally marked the inauthenticity of their “blackness”; their ridicule asserted the difference between
counterfeit and currency even as they disseminated what most audiences believed were black
music, dance, and gesture Lott, Eric. Love and Theft. Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working
Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993, 39. Similarly, Ralph Ellison claimed that the coun-
terfeiting of the black image is the result of “America’s Manichean fascination with the symbolism
of blackness and whiteness,” and therefore its referent is not black and white people, but rather the
process of signification of race itself. Ellison, Ralph. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” (1958)
The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Modern Library Edition, 1995: 103.
20. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1995 [1952]), p. 218.
21. “Assimilation” she writes, “relies upon the genetic reproduction of whiteness and the cultural
reproduction of the values of Anglo-Saxons within a genetically illogical racial system requiring
that racial identity be reduced essentially to a white/non-white binary, allowing the maintenance of
a white center with non-white margins.” Harryette Mullen, “Optic White: Blackness and the
Production of Whiteness,” Diacritics 24, no. 2-3 (Summer/Fall 1994): 73–74.
22. Optic blackness, argues Lhamon, is a white created disparaging cultural imagery, which is
endorsed by blacks (or people in comparable socio-historical position within Atlantic moder-
nity) as a form of social criticism, in order to display their refusal to fit. “Beginning in stereo-
types, optic blackness acknowledges and works through stereotypic effects, usually turning
them inside out.” “Optic blackness is not authentically or experientially black – as various as
that must be – but authentically corrupt, like Atlantic life and history.” Lhamon, W.T., Jr. “Optic
Black: Naturalizing the Refusal to Fit.” Black Cultural Traffic. Crossroads in Global Performance and
Popular Culture. Ed. Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Jackson Kennell. Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, 2005, 115; 113.
23. For some contemporary artists, argues Diawara, blackface functions as criterion for transtextuality,
“an artifice which enables the performer to fill all the spaces that the old stereotype occupied and
to be the star of the new show. If the old stereotype is the projection of white supremacist thinking
onto black people, the new stereotype compounds matters by desiring that image, and deforming
its content for a different appropriation.” Diawara, M. (1999). “The Blackface Stereotype”.
Blackface. David Levinthal. Santa Fe, NM, Arena Editions, 15–16.
24. De Guzman, René. “Nothing Better.” Pitch Blackness. Hank Willis Thomas. Aperture, 2009: 95–96.
25. This work was exhibited in 2008 at the High Museum in Atlanta as part of the exhibition “After
1968. Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy.” June 7-October 5, 2008.
26. As similar argument, in relation to John Stahl’s film Imitation of Life (1934) is made by Lauren
Berlant in “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life.” Comparative American Identities.
Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. Hortense J. Spillers. New York and London:
Routledge, 1991: 110–40.
27. Kelley, Robin. “Burning Symbols: The Work of Art in the Age of Tyrannical (Re)production.” Pitch
Blackness. Hank Willis Thomas. Aperture, 2009: 103.
28. “Because of its purported technological objectivity as a recording device,” argues Coco Fusco, “pho-
tography was marshaled to document the ‘fact’ of racial difference [and, in the process] produced
race as a visualizable fact.” Fusco, Coco ““Racial Time, Racial Marks, Racial Metaphors.” Only Skin
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Deep. Changing Visions of the American Self. Eds., Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis. New York:
International Center of Photography, 2003, 16.
29. Photography, in fact, emerged at the same time as the rise of race science, providing the latter with
a language and a technological apparatus that reinforced an understanding of the visual image as
a trace. As a result, as Jennifer Gonzalez argues, the truth effect of photography and the truth effect
of race coincide insofar as “both kinds of ‘truth effects’ naturalize ideological systems by making
them visible and, apparently, self-evident.” Gonzalez, Jennifer. “Morphologies: Race as a Visual
Technology.” Only Skin Deep. Changing Visions of the American Self. Eds., Coco Fusco and Brian
Wallis. New York: International Center of Photography, 2003. See also, Smith, Shawn Michelle.
American Archives. Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture. Ed. Anonymous. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999 and Sekula, Allan, and Bolton Richard. “The Body and the
Archive.” The Contest of Meaning. Critical Histories of Photography. vols. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.
343–89.
30. His photographs appear to almost illustrate the way in which Charles Mills characterizes the
socio-materiality of race: “[n]ot originally biological/natural, it becomes biologized/naturalized,
the European specter penetrating the skin, incorporating our vision of ourselves and of others.”
Mills, Charles. From Class to Race. Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Lanham. Md:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003): 168–9.
31. On this connection see Rene de Cox. On The Scourged Back see Collins, Kathleen. “The Scourged
Back,” History of Photography 9. January 1985: 43–45. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “The Shadow and the
Substance: Race, Photography, and the Index.” Only Skin Deep. Changing Visions of the American
Self. Ed. Fusco Coco, and Wallis Brian. New York: International Center of Photography, 2003.
111–28. See also Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory. Visual Representations of Slavery in England and
America 1780-1865. New York: Routledge, 2000. Wood discusses also the representations and the
iconography of the slave ship, which is frequently revisited in Willis Thomas’s work.
32. For further exploration of the relationship between corporeality and the mimetic claims of trade-
marks see Coombe, Rosemary. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation
and the Law. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.
33. For an account of the historical context and meaning of the designation ‘postblack’ in relation to
contemporary African-American art, see Campbell, Mary Schmidt. “African American Art in a
Post-Black Era.” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 17.3 (2007): 317–30
34. “Because ayo invites people to wish for her object status without actually delivering herself as
such [] ayo is the object-less art piece, but the audience, rendered vulnerable once they expose a
desire to appropriate blackness that goes unconsummated in the relationship ayo establishes,
become objectified by their lack of agency. [T]he resistance to psychic and socioeconomic violence
emerges [] from the inversion of the ways in which the subject/object relationship is traditionally
racialized, both in the realm of the arts and in everyday social experience.” Wilkins Catanese,
Brandi. ““How Do I Rent a Negro?”: Racialized Subjectivity and Digital Performance Art.” Theater
Journal 75 (2005): 704. Obadike’s 10th warning ironically addresses these fantasies: “The Seller does
not recommend that this Blackness be used by whites looking for a wild weekend.”
35. Fusco, Coco. “All Too Real. The Tale of an On-Line Black Sale Coco Fusco Interviews Keith
Townsend Obadike” 09/24/2001. http://www.blacknetart.com/index1_1.html accessed on 9/3/2009.
Ultimately, as Jennifer Gonzalez argues, Obadike’s failure to sell his blackness shows that race is
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not a property but rather a “relation of public encounters” taking place under the form of a commod-
ity. Gonzalez, Jennifer. “The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice.” Camera
Obscura 70.24 (2009): 56.
36. Consider, for instance, the following listed benefits: 5. This Blackness may be used for dating a
black person without fear of public scrutiny. 6. This Blackness may be used for gaining access to
exclusive, “high risk” neighborhoods.” And, among the warnings: “4. The Seller does not recom-
mend that this Blackness be used while shopping or writing a personal check.”
37. Kaplan, Michael. “Iconomics: The Rhetoric of Speculation.” Public Culture 15.3 (2003): 477–93.
38. Elam, Harry J., Jr. “Change Clothes and Go: A Postscript to Postblackness.” Black Cultural Traffic.
Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture. Ed. Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Jackson Kennell.
vols. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005: 386.
39. When race – the most ‘attached’ of the body’s discursive attributes – is abstracted from the body
as its bearer, then it becomes fully clear how blackness is a condition of visibility, more than a
visual object.
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