Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 17 Number 2, August 2016
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Thompson, Krista, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015. 349, ISBN 978-0-8223-5794-0
Reviewed by
University of South Africa
In the book, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (2015), Krista Thompson provides a historical account of the migration and circulation of blackness in the ‘Circum-Caribbean’ region. The United States and the South American locales of Jamaica and Bahamas are identified as the locales on which the text focuses. But blackness in this case is typically a twenty-first century’s phenomenon, distinguishable in those cultural practices that involve the generic usage of the camera and digital technologies (3). The book traces black Africaneity to the urban spaces of the 1980s (5-6), confirming the author’s apparent unconcern with those cultural tropes that outspokenly track black African people in the diasporas to continent Africa. The book’s delimitation of this geographical focus appears to have been carefully chosen, emphasising that the author is departing from the well-trodden but by far unexhausted theme of the travel of narratives from Africa to the rest of the world, especially as having been engineered by trans-Atlantic slavery or the violence of Western modernity in Africa.
However, the apparent disinterest does not in any way imply that the author is ignorant of the widely-accepted and cited treatise of blackness persuasively submitted by, for instance, Frantz Fanon in the seminal Black Skin, White Masks ([1958] 2008). Throughout the four main chapters of Thompson’s book, the black skin is shown to be eliciting a dilemma on account of being ‘overdetermined from without’ by white colonial discourse. In addition, the spectre of Fanon stalks the preamble that opens each of Thompson’s Chapters, further tying them up neatly with an absence of blackness, understood as being oppositional. Ironically, this absence is critiqued in the voice of the Afro-American comedian, Chris Rock, that Thompson uses to introduce Chapter 1, ‘Keep it Real’. According to Rock, the urban and 1980s version of blackness is obsessed with light and shine (Thompson 2015: 47). Rock’s criticism has a remarkable traction, as he comments on the contemporary black culture upon which Thompson focuses. The reader will have to figure out the kind(s) of dialogue(s) that Thompson attempts to initiate in her prefacing of her chapters with the voices of critics such as Jacques Lacan (in Thompson, 112) who are not generally considered to have pronounced on the same key theme of blackness that preoccupies her in this book. A comparable enterprise awaits the reader upon her discovering that Thompson invokes black cultural commentators such as Ralph Ellison (in Thompson, 215) who are known to have understood black alienation as being a product of the Jim Crow period.
And yet, in terms of the chapters’ contentions, the book also shows that, in dramatic responses, black people demonstrate that, on account of white racism, they find themselves drawn into a battle where race is equated to value and where its visual signifier is skin pigment. The proposal also seems to be that, upon seeing no discourse outside this metonym, blacks then perform it in visual spectacles, disrupting its authority. This thesis is remarkably enunciated in the appropriately-titled ‘Introduction: Of Shine, Bling and Bixels’. The opening paragraph is particularly arresting, as it is where the author refers to an episode resplendent with ricocheting luminosity; she is in a bus the ‘exterior’ of which is ‘built’ out of ‘[f]lat television screens’ ‘[b]eaming with bright white and electric-blue lights’ (Thompson, 2015: 1). This vehicle is a fascinating object of attention. At the same time, the bus occasions the onlookers a fleeting sense of them being gleamed against images of far-flung settings in a radiant ambience. On its own, the moment creates an impression of a people networked with other worlds.
Subtly, through this instant, the author prepares grounds to launch critiques of the distinct self-representation practices that black people initiate across the Circum-Caribbean. These are self-depictions in which the awareness of being represented is savoured for its own transient end. It is hence that, for Thompson, the basic text of this self- portrayal is a performed one involving the usage of the video-recorder fitted with equipment that delimits the focal area with intense light. Because of its ephemerality and penetrating light, the photographic moment, this Introductory Chapter argues, ‘prevent[s] the photograph from turning to its referent’ (Thompson, 2015:17), and creates ‘after-images’ or ‘optical illusions that persist in one’s vision after the exposure to light or visual stimulus’ (14, cf.17). Imbuing the practice a revolutionary ambience, Thompson argues that the performance has genesis against ‘the use of a torn carte de visite on a reward notice for a runaway slave from Georgia in 1863’ (17, cf.19). The mode and referent of such a notice objectified black people according to the nineteenth century European philosophy on race.
Thus far, Thompson does not appear to be intentionally attributing anything negative to the 1980s black shine and bling culture. But it seems this slightly changes twenty pages into the book where Thompson reviews the readings done on ‘the shallowness and simulated reality of celebrity culture’ (20), that is, its black ‘conspicuous consumption’ (Thompson, 2015:31), a phrase that recurs ad infinitum. It is interesting that Thompson approaches this visual aesthetics through the corresponding scholarships. From this perspective, she rhetorically asks a poignant and ethical question: whether the practice is indicative of alienation from pervasive white racist hegemonies, or of disillusionment with the ‘metastasis’ of the civil rights movement (30, cf.31). Essentially, at the gist of this rumination is an image of pathology, if not a set of pathologies. And yet, what Thompson appears to issue out as a response is that her focus is on how African people in the diaspora begin and participate in ‘their own visual economy’ (24) in ways that ‘disrupt’ (25) the primacy that the extensive Western colonial history of photography accords to light imagery.
The author systematically takes the reader into the generic template of this highly emotive process of the response; blacks, especially the black man, makes his body ‘reflect and absorb light the way photo emulsion makes photographic paper sensitive to light’ (Thompson, 2015:22-23). This is a process of skin bleaching. Here, the skin is turned into a palimpsest, the ‘pixels’ of which are assumed to be adjustable reminiscent of those of a digital ‘surface’ (36). The object is to represent oneself being represented in a blinding and sparkling light. Thereafter, clothed in popular brand and then set against an image of an economically higher urban environment, the subject then courts a video-light camera. In the respective subsequent chapters, the primary text varies, such as shown in Thompson’s focus on the ‘proms’ culture in the Bahamas (Chapter 3), and on the Hip-hop tradition in Chapter 4. Thompson argues that what emerges are ‘subjectivities and configurations of the political in what might be considered a post-rights era, when’ they ‘seem’ ‘unfulfilled’ (30-31).
In elaborating upon this clearly-articulated thesis, each chapter details how the stage elements of this rejoinder are re-utilised in recognisable black popular cultural practices across Circum-Caribbean sites. In Chapter 1, the culture concerns the ‘history, aesthetics and economics of street photography’ (Thompson, 2015:49). By contrast, Chapter 2 preoccupies itself with how publicity is courted by appearing in flashlight in dancehalls in Jamaica while, in Chapter 3, the incandescence is discussed as it appears in the proms tradition in the Bahamas. In the concluding Chapter 4, the author concentrates on the same radiance as it enlivens Hip-Hop culture. It is also in this final Chapter that the theme of visuality is brilliantly discussed, interestingly, in terms of it being a disruption of the Cartesian logic upon which, for instance, Trans-Atlantic slavery resided.
Each of Thompson’s chapters engages a dialogue with extensive European scholarships on the histories of the arts, denying them their racist shine. The irony is that, as in Deconstruction, Thompson’s impressive readings of Western erudition are not matched by an infinitesimal awareness of the institutional evolution of the arts in black Africa as well as their travels into the Diasporas. As it were, classic or autochthonous African arts and African diasporic identities are glossed as prosaic and dark oppositional entities, and never as phenomena that write their own aesthetics and paradigms – however controversial they might be. And yet, curiously in this book, the agonistic is consistently blinded in the key motif in which the book posts blackness in the metaphor of a flashlight, that is, supposedly beyond the Cartesian white/black logic. In this attempted transcendence, the pathological, as intimated in the dreadful skin bleaching penchant or in the predilection to capture oneself being seen being represented, is valorised for being a circulating text and one that enunciates a new form of black resistance. By contrast, the discourse of black African Civil Rights, apparent in various archives such as in the images of the dreadlocked Rastafari, is seemingly dismissed for being incapable of inspiring (black) sublimities.
It is perhaps hence that the author does not explicitly situate her thesis within the major debates on the evolution of the literary and cultural institutions of resistance in the Circum-Caribbean, citing, for instance, the Haiti revolution. However, despite this declared faithfulness to discussing the bling-bling culture exclusively, the dialogues with this nationalist landscape can be heard in subtle and useful ways. It seems that the rationale for the sole concern with the urban black modernities of the Circum-Caribbean has to do with the fact that it is fundamentally cosmopolitan, that is, prosperous with a potpourri of diverse narratives and languages. It is a cosmopolitanism that also contrasts with the Antillanité (see Édouard Glissant, [1990] 1997). In terms of the Antillanité, diverse ethnic or cultural differences, as opposed to the nationalist conception of blackness or Négritude, are preferred in the anti-colonial struggle. But fast-forwarding us to the twenty-first century in virtually the same locale, it seems Thompson sees adequate evidence that nuances blackness a step beyond the Antillanité. In Thompson’s view, the specifics coalesce themselves around a repertoire of reading and cultural performance practices dialogical to those apparent in the histories of art across the first world. This is a valuable and provocative contribution to Black Studies at large.
References
Fanon, Frantz. [1952] 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
Glissant, Édouard. [1990] 1997. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.