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Carceral aesthetics: penal space, time, and matter -- State goods: clandestine practices and prison art collectives -- Captured by the frame: photographic studies of prisoners -- Interior subjects: portraits by incarcerated ̜̜artists -- Fraught imaginaries: collaborative art in prison -- Art in solitary confinement -- Posing in prison: family photographs, practices of belonging, and carceral landscapes.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. "I Am Trayvon Martin": The Boy Who Became an Icon -- Chapter 2. Democracy's Promise: The Black Political Leader as Icon -- Chapter 3. Giving Face: Diana Ross and the Black Celebrity as Icon -- Chapter 4. The Black Athlete: Racial Precarity and the American Sports Icon -- Coda -- Notes

Troubling Vision addresses American culture's fixation on black visibility, exploring how blackness is persistently seen as a problem in public culture and even in black scholarship that challenges racist discourse. Through trenchant analysis, Nicole R. Fleetwood reorients the problem of black visibility by turning attention to what it means to see blackness and to the performative codes that reinforce, resignify, and disrupt its meaning. Working across visual theory and performance studies, Fleetwood asks, How is the black body visualized as both familiar and disruptive? How might we investigate the black body as a troubling presence to the scopic regimes that define it as such? How is value assessed based on visible blackness? Fleetwood documents multiple forms of engagement with the visual, even as she meticulously underscores how the terms of engagement change in various performative contexts. Examining a range of practices from the documentary photography of Charles "Teenie" Harris to the "excess flesh" performances of black female artists and pop stars to the media art of Fatimah Tuggar to the iconicity of Michael Jackson, Fleetwood reveals and reconfigures the mechanics, codes, and metaphors of blackness in visual culture. "Troubling Vision is a path-breaking book that examines the problem of seeing blackness-the simultaneous hyper-visibility and invisibility of African Americans-in US visual culture in the last half century. Weaving together critical modes and methodologies from performance studies, art history, critical race studies, visual culture analysis, and gender theory, Fleetwood expands Du Bois's idea of double vision into a broad questioning of whether 'representation itself will resolve the problem of the black body in the field of vision.' With skilled attention to historical contexts, documentary practices, and media forms,

"Posing in Prison" examines vernacular photography and studio portraiture taken inside US prisons through an investigation of the production practices and the circulation of these images in and out of prisons. The photographs include images that document family visits to incarcerated relatives and portraits taken by incarcerated photographers in makeshift studios designed in prison. The article considers how such photographs function as practices of intimacy and belonging for those imprisoned and their loved ones.